Night shadows, p.2
Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 2
He stumbled on through the trenches, his ears filled with the roar of slaughter behind him. He glanced up again, groggily – saw a big lander coming down less than a kilometre off, its swollen hull running with friction-flame and smoke, its flanks split open to reveal rows and rows of launch cradles. Beyond that was a voidship coming down. A voidship! Hells, it was massive, its high-atmosphere passage kindling thunderheads and scatter-lightning, its mighty thrusters burning up what was left of the cloud cover, its stressed void shields crackling like corposant.
What had happened to the Grand Fleet? Where was the orbital defence picket? How were those things getting through?
No time to speculate, no time to think, just stagger onwards, slip and skid and stumble and keep moving. Borasc was killed, shot clean through with some kind of ice-white energy beam. Nuih and Gorkolis were dropped next, overtaken by the hunters, engaged, snarled in combat, cut to pieces. They were being chewed through, ground up, minced down to gobbets of blood-soaked, bone-flecked detritus. The hunters were closing, coming into visual range now, loping after them with terrifying speed. He spat blood into his vox-grille, viscous and slimy. His breathing was like an old man’s, wheezing out of overworked lungs.
Then he saw the Stormbird, a few hundred metres off, grounded, its marker lights on, unguarded, half lost in the tumbling smog banks and mortar flares. IV Legion – his own. He’d be able to crack it open, activate the thrusters.
Who was still with him? Alescu was on his shoulder, limping badly. Old Mnon, bitter old Mnon, just behind him. A few beyond that, struggling in the haze and the disintegrating terrain – five or six, no more.
‘Take it!’ he roared, his voice strangled and hoarse.
No one was guarding it, its old crew were gone. They piled inside, activating the drives while the crew-bay doors were still creaking into place. The gunship took off in an explosion of mud and filth and chem spillage, erupting out of the mire and labouring to gain loft. Almost immediately, targeting runes flashed up across the cockpit console – dozens of them, hundreds of them. Another Stormbird had achieved take-off just ahead of them, one caked in mud and bearing the symbols of the Night Lords. It took a hit to its spine that punched it back down to earth, another to its starboard flank that kicked it over, then two more to its cockpit before a seeker missile corkscrewed into its exposed underbelly and blew the whole thing up.
Theokon piloted straight into the cloud of shrapnel, risking damage to benefit from a few precious moments of sensor-overloading heat and plasma. The forward viewer ran blank with raging flames for a split second, and then they were out again, boosting and slanting through a forest of energy beams and hard rounds, a crowded airspace of descending hunters and desperate prey. Visibility was non-existent beyond a few hundred metres, just a miasma of explosions and flying wreckage and somersaulting flyer carcasses. No tactics, no possibility of evading incoming fire, just the hope that those around you, the ones you’d just been fighting alongside as part of the greatest army ever assembled, would take the las beam or the projectile strike in your stead.
This was wretched. This was base, ignoble, cowardly.
Keep running.
Somehow they had made it out of the first kill-zones, climbing erratically, pushing the envelope to gain speed, streaking clear of the core volume of airborne destruction. Theokon had tilted hard to evade a reeling Thunderhawk, turned his head for an instant, and got what he instinctively knew would be his last view of Terra.
The entire Himalazian plateau lay far below, an ellipse of fire from horizon to curved horizon, the great stage of all their dramas. It was burning, all of it now, glimmering an angry red, punctured by millions of dark points streaming down from the fleets above. In the very centre stood the mighty Sanctum Imperialis, the last redoubt, vast beyond vast, compassed by its concentric rings of trenches and earthworks, its soaring domes cracked and its towers splintered. It was solid, blackened, like a hateful pupil set in a loathsome eye, unblinking, devastated, lingering.
It would endure. They had not killed it. It would remain. It would be gazing after them as they fled into the void, staring, staring, never leaving them.
Theokon screamed. Not from fear now, but from frustration, from fury, from a diamond-pure hatred that surged up within him and flooded his every vein and artery.
He gazed at that eye, the great eye of the earth, fire-ringed and eternal, and screamed at it.
Live. Survive. A place will be found.
The Stormbird flew hard and fast, a spear thrust out of the heart of ruin, streaking through the burning heavens.
Live.
This was all that remained. To persist. To not be extinguished.
Survive.
They had lost. They had lost everything.
Get. Out.
CHAPTER TWO
It was like losing a limb, they said. In all the testimony, that was consistent. They had been using the facility for so many years, in some cases their entire lives, and then it was gone. But a lost limb has its phantom – that is common enough. The feeling that, even after the amputation, something remains. And if something remains, then the old facility can surely come back. That is what they told themselves. But they didn’t know. They hoped it was true, even as the rest of the galaxy prayed that they were wrong. No honest person wanted the unnatural talents to return. Only the witches did.
– Examiner Yellos DePranda, remarks taken from records of the Formal Inquisition into the Withdrawal of the Gifts
The atmosphere had a sound to it that was new, a constant rumble, just like the onset of a thunderstorm, though never-ending, never coming to fruition, just the high-pressure, temple-aching premonition of a tempest yet to come.
The real storm was over. No storm would ever be as great. They were living in the after-echoes of it now, the resonance of so many severed souls. The echoes would fade eventually, he assumed. Ebb away, like ripples on water. You had to hope so, anyway. No world could exist like this forever.
Titus Prayto narrowed his eyes. The sky was a dull grey, chopped-up with the cloud cover that had been permanent ever since the Siege’s end. Had he never been to Terra before, he might have assumed that it had always been that way, a world swathed forever in faded shadow, but he had been here, decades previously, and it still grieved him to see the way the planet had been changed. So complete, so utterly complete – as if the Traitor had been able to reach into the molecules and the atoms and wrench them into new and degraded patterns. The wind tasted of rust, the soil stank of chems. It was wounded to the marrow, this world, a place of gossamer-pale ghosts and half-caught reflections.
But it was also inert. Greyer, colder, harder. Prayto felt that most deeply of all. It wasn’t the physical wound he sensed, but the absence of something that had been there before – a substrate, an unseen layer of significance. Someone without the gift would not have seen the change so clearly, but even the simplest of souls would have picked up some degree of wrongness underpinning it all.
Empty. Pained and empty like a stomach after vomiting. The wind was there, the soil was there, the clouds and the rust and the tang of the chems, but it was all so flimsy, all so flat.
He looked up. The clouds were moving. For some time he’d thought they were racing east, driven by some greater wind he couldn’t detect. It had taken him a while, during the journey, to realise his mistake. He’d gradually perceived the shape of it – just a portion of an immense gyre, turning very slowly, but picking up speed. He knew well enough where the epicentre would be and marvelled at the size of the effect. By now he was hundreds of kilometres west of the Palace ruins, and still the clouds were turning. If anything, the glacial pace seemed to be picking up, accelerating bit by bit.
Just one more after-effect. One more wound that might never close. What a world this was, now. What a place they had made for themselves.
He had been travelling alone since leaving the ruins. That was dangerous. Terra was dangerous, with battles still raging across all continental zones, and so troops were in critically short supply. Hard to imagine that, really, given how many the primarch had brought with him, but then the Sol System was a very big place and even the Avenging Thirteenth was stretched thin bringing it all under control. So Prayto travelled by himself, rejecting the escort that his master had asked him to take. No sense in wasting more blades on me, he’d said, when there are still traitor throats to be cut in the void.
The primarch had agreed, though perhaps with his thoughts somewhat elsewhere. Prayto couldn’t blame him for that – even that astonishing mind was stretched to the limit now, occupied with the million threads of a reconquest that had to happen very quickly lest they still lose it all. This place was so fragile, so damaged, that it felt like any more violence would surely break it, but of course violence was still necessary, and so they had to keep going despite the risks. He would just have to avoid the worst of the fighting, keep himself to himself, trust to stealth.
Prayto had walked out of the Palace, or what remained of it, because no vehicle could be spared. No vehicle! In a fleet of thousands of warships, each of them carrying thousands of landers and skimmers and flyers, still none could be secured for this. He’d found his own in the end – a battered but serviceable atmospheric troop carrier with two out of three turbines operative. It was slow, it was dirty, but it did the job.
For all his gifts, he’d found it hard to concentrate on what he was seeing as he travelled. Somehow it was difficult to look at it all, to focus, to try to make sense of the destruction. Everything was gone, horizon to horizon, erased and ground down into mere scraps and slivers. Towers should have reared from the earth, gold-lined, shining with steel and polished granite. Transitways should have snaked between them, bustling with ground traffic. Domes and viaducts and landing spires should have competed for space, none of them old, all burnished with the self-confidence of the new and powerful.
All gone. The completeness of it was more than the results of war – it was surely deliberate, a policy of erasure that must have absorbed the energy of millions. They had demolished as they had advanced, and then demolished those remains too, and then pulverised and smashed up those leavings until everything was the same, a landscape of poisoned dust that scooped into slicks and drifts. During the day it was dull and unreflective. At night it glimmered like phosphorus. It was a manmade desert, the largest that this world had ever seen, its sands the residue of old industrial construction, its silicas and its ceramics sticky with drying blood.
You couldn’t look at it for long. Your eyes glazed, you lost your focus. More than once he’d almost scraped the lander too low, briefly mesmerised by the absence of anything to latch on to.
After many hours of that, he came across the first city. It was a ruin too, just like the Palace, its buildings hollow and hot with the afterglow of munitions. Living things stalked through its shadows, most of them debauched mockeries of humans, too slow or stupid to get off-world before the inferno overtook them. Some signals, just a few, were of his own people, the bringers of vengeance, the XIII. He locked on to their locators, brought the carrier down. Then he walked to find them, his boots sinking deep into the dust between the tower skeletons.
He caught up with the first squad a few moments later. They weren’t advancing stealthily – they were in the open, heads up, weapons drawn, going methodically. Their cobalt-blue armour was coated in a fine dust-film, but was otherwise pristine. Nothing much would harm them, here. This was an eradication operation. A clearing out of filth.
The sergeant was called Orpedon. He was of the 12th Chapter, Fourth Battalion, Ninth Company. As Prayto approached out of the drifting haze, Orpedon saluted respectfully. Those around him, six more Tactical Marines, did the same. The welcome was proper, if not especially warm. Prayto imagined they didn’t want to be here. He imagined they wanted to be assigned to missions of greater danger, to the full-scale wars still burning between worlds or elsewhere on this one. He wondered what objectives they had been sent to secure in such a place. There must have been something – the primarch did not waste his resources, even in conditions of such relative abundance.
‘Greetings, sergeant,’ Prayto said. ‘How goes the mission?’
‘Well enough,’ said Orpedon, reaching up to remove his helm. He locked it, wiped his brow. He had a solid, rather sour, face. ‘Do you bring orders?’
He would have liked that, this sergeant. ‘No, I have my own hunt. One of our father’s brethren.’
Orpedon nodded. ‘The Promethean.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
‘Not directly. There was an old hive, much further west. He burned it down, it’s said. Discovered… foul things.’
‘And after that?’
‘We picked up reports he’d gone north. Or gone mad.’ Orpedon paused. ‘Just what we heard.’
‘Watch your tongue, sergeant. He is a son of the Emperor.’
‘My apologies.’ Another pause. ‘Though I would not blame him if he had. This world is…’
Prayto could have finished the sentence for him. Spoiled.
‘How long ago was that report?’ he asked.
‘Three days.’ The sergeant’s guardedness morphed into a wary curiosity. ‘If I may ask–’
‘By all means. The primarch wishes to convene a council. For charting the path ahead. For reconstruction.’
Orpedon didn’t reply, but for a split second his expression betrayed him.
‘You think that too soon?’ Prayto didn’t wish to be hard on him. After what they’d all seen, what they’d all done, even the best souls were prone to doubt. ‘Nothing is impossible. Not after Calth. Remember our darkest hours, and recall how the primarch redeemed them. If a thing can be broken, it can also be mended.’
Orpedon bowed, suitably chastised. ‘Just as you say.’
But was it? Did Prayto believe it himself, or were the motions merely there to be gone through? The dust was everywhere here, just as it was for kilometre upon kilometre beyond this dead city. All the cities of Terra were dead or dying now, little more than morgues harbouring nightmares. Could you even build on this terrain again? Wouldn’t the dust just swallow you up, sinking your foundations into the poisoned earth as you scrabbled to raise the walls higher?
Some sicknesses were too severe. Some wounds were too great. There was a reason Apothecaries carried the carnifex.
‘North, then,’ Prayto confirmed.
‘Three days ago,’ Orpedon replied.
‘My thanks. I shall go to find him. Be joyful in your work, sergeant. The night is over, the dawn is come. A better Imperium shall rise yet.’
Orpedon bowed, but said nothing further. He gestured to his troops, and the squad moved off, trudging through the shin-deep dust. Prayto watched them go. For a while he couldn’t place what bothered him about the scene. Then he saw the fractional slant of their shoulders, the minuscule casualness in the way they carried their bolters.
They don’t look like they won, he thought.
He turned back to walk to the flyer. However hard he tried, his mind drifted back to mournfulness.
How, though, could it be otherwise? the inner voice told him treacherously. Whom did we defeat here? Who else was present?
The dust swirled up into his vox-intake, bitter, irritating.
Only ourselves. Our mirrors. That is who we killed. No joy to be had in that.
CHAPTER THREE
Speaker> Why did you do it?
Subject> Do what?
Speaker> Do not feign ignorance. It will go poorly for you. Why did you do it?
Subject> Fight? Why did I fight?
Speaker> Why did you turn against the Emperor, the doctrines of Unity, the Imperial order?
Subject> I was fighting for the Emperor.
Speaker> You were fighting for the Traitor.
Subject> No. No, that was… We were fighting for the Emperor. Against His false advisers.
Speaker> You know that is a lie. The Warmaster was the betrayer.
Subject> No, we had to save the Emperor. Cleanse Terra.
Speaker> Cleanse Terra? From what?
Subject> The traitors. We were fighting them. The false advisers.
Speaker> [Pause for collation] Did all your comrades feel this way? Your leaders?
Subject> [Pause for recollection] I don’t know. Many of us… See, I never asked.
– Transcript from Interrogation Centre 532,
Albia, submitted for the Jupiter-4 Tribunals
She’d never even got close. That might have been the worst of it. Months, months, all those months out in the void. Actions in backwater worlds, miserable actions, the kind that tested faith almost to destruction. She’d only seen Astartes from a distance a few times in all that stretch. Didn’t really know which Legion – maybe Sons of Horus? She’d hoped so, because they were great liberators, the ones that motivated her followers the most. But you never really knew. Warfronts were always dark, always confusing, filled with smog and filth and overlapping orders, and you really just had to kill or be killed, stay alive, get through it and hope to see the great prize before the end.
It had got really bad in those last two years, though. Some of the gifts they had increasingly been showered with were… difficult. Rebo had died, and that had been a bad death. The thing that had started to live in his entrails had wanted a way out, and nothing they did to kill it made any difference. Others, many others, had started to lose their minds long before Terra appeared on the augurs. It was all that time in the holds of the troop carriers, all that time in the warp. The whispers had become shouts, the shadows of monsters had become true monsters. It had made them powerful, to be sure. They could do things with many of those gifts, but it came at a cost. They lost so many from sickness, from runaway mutations, from the perennial drop into insanity.
