Hand of abaddon, p.19
Hand Of Abaddon, page 19
Its death blow was averted when a spear of black rock impaled it straight through the torso. It hung there like an insect caught on a collector’s pin, writhing. The other two hesitated as some kind of unspoken communication passed between them, the unforeseen development forcing recalibration. They circled instead, one left, the other right, blades dragging in their wake.
One was crushed as a piece of the wall thrust outwards like a fist and smashed it against the opposite side of the chamber. The other was flung upwards as if a spring had exploded beneath it, but it was the rock again, punching it into the air. Three tines of blackstone impaled the machine before it could land and it jerked momentarily in its trap, until the red lenses faded and extinguished.
Yheng breathed heavily, looking from the destroyed machines to her still-outstretched hand, regarding it like a foreign entity that had managed to attach itself to her body. This was what she had felt like as she and Tenebrus faced off against the ghouls. A hidden power at her fingertips. She had denied it then, but had now chosen to embrace it.
‘The fortress does not want you dead, Tharador Yheng,’ said Augury, who had appeared alongside her. ‘It wants to show you something.’
At the far end of the chamber a portal opened, a split in the rock that had not been there before.
Yheng regarded Augury warily. ‘I will no longer be manipulated,’ she warned. ‘Not by Tenebrus, not by you. Not anyone.’
Augury bowed at the waist. ‘Consider me a guide, Tharador Yheng. Use me only as you wish to.’
Yheng paused at that, deciding. ‘What were those things?’ she asked, gesturing to the machine corpses, not quite ready to take everything on faith. These creatures had been sent here to kill her, if not by the fortress then by what, by whom?
‘Each of us of the Hand has a different agenda,’ Augury said.
Scepticism narrowed Yheng’s eyes. ‘And yours is?’
‘To see a worthy acolyte take what is hers.’
‘Are you merely telling me what I want to hear?’
‘Only you can decide whether you want to trust me.’
‘How can I trust something when I cannot even see its face?’
A thin smile turned Augury’s pale mouth. ‘Believe me, Yheng, you do not want to see my true face.’
A shudder ran through Yheng unbidden, but she sensed no lie in Augury’s words.
‘Tenebrus said you would devour yourselves, that there was war coming.’ She finally lowered her outstretched hand.
‘He is right. The Fourth of the Hand wants to claim the shards for their own. They were once of flesh, and have never shed the petty ambitions of their original creation.’
The Iron Magus. The creatures were machines, by-blows of Dark Mechanicum warp-science as Yheng had suspected.
‘But I don’t have the shards,’ Yheng pointed out. ‘What am I to them?’
‘Like Tenebrus, the Iron Magus sees your potential. You are a branch of possibility they want to prune. Because you are important, Yheng, and that interferes with their plans. Surely you must realise that. In the black chamber…’
‘I felt the presence of the gods, their eye upon me. I sensed… They wanted something of me, but I know not what. I cannot discern their will.’
‘Few can, and fewer still receive such a blessing. You are touched by them, Yheng. They see you. This place, the fortress, it dwells partly in the warp and partly in the materium.’
Yheng touched her fingers to the cold blackstone, wary of what might happen, but it was dormant. ‘Tenebrus said it was like a beast, a shackled beast straining at the leash.’ She took her hand away. ‘In pain.’ She looked up at Augury. ‘That it had a twin.’
‘Yes, I suppose that is true. It wants to die, Yheng, and in you it has found an outlet for its anger. You must have felt its kinship?’
Yheng thought back to her encounter with the ghouls again, that the creatures had only appeared when Tenebrus had showed himself, that she thought they might not have been after her at all.
Protecting me… From him.
‘From everything and everyone that would do you harm,’ said Augury, and the unnerving sense that they were in Yheng’s thoughts swept over her. ‘It wants to keep you alive, so you might free it.’
‘The Fourth wants to kill me, and the First wants to use me,’ Yheng said with rising anger. ‘I ask again, what do you want of me, Eighth of the Hand?’
Augury barely moved, but Yheng thought she detected the slightest lowering of their head, or whatever passed for one. ‘I feel your rage, Yheng. It is understandable. All I want is to be your ally. For you to reach your potential. In the end, we all serve the will of the gods, and this is how I serve you.’
‘Then how?’ If she must submit, in part, to see where this was headed, then so be it. ‘If you are my ally, my guide, what must I do?’
‘For now, all you need do is look…’
Yheng found she could not stare at Augury for long, for even formless in their cloak the echoes and presentiments of what they were and what they might yet become flickered at the edge of her senses. So she turned away, and there before her again was the mirror. She couldn’t remember passing through the portal, leaving the chamber of stalactites behind, and yet here she was, back where she had started.
And all there was left to do was look.
There, sculpted in the liquid obsidian, was a wretch, a lowly cultist. Yheng recognised herself from when she had scraped an existence in the catacombs of Gathalamor. She had begun as a pilgrim, but that had ended badly; then a scavenger, not much more than a girl back then, collecting bones from the deserts and the petty battlefields where the hive-killers clashed. The rare pieces she sold to the bone-merchants or the greedy ossuary-priests. Just another life to be churned up by the merciless Imperium. The shape of the scavenger became the hive-ganger wearing tatty flak armour and carrying a worn stubber. Her tattoos proclaimed her allegiance, a bird-skull mask hiding half of her face. From here the road to cultism was short, and Tharador Yheng joined the Blade Unsheathed as the Imperial yoke began to bite and promises of power rose like whispers in her mind.
The liquid obsidian re-formed again, an echo projecting backwards into Yheng’s life and finding expression in who she had been. Now, the acolyte, a lowly servant of the Word and Kar-Gatharr’s creature. One of a multitude, unremarkable, discardable. She changed again, subtly this time, as she became the student of a different master. From the then to the now, so what came next would be the potential after…
Yheng felt her heart beating and struggled to breathe.
Her acolyte self began to wither. She saw her muscle wasting as her face harrowed and her skin greyed, until little more than a half-fleshed skeleton stared back.
‘What is this?’ she rasped.
Augury’s voice held no comfort. ‘What do you see?’
‘Only death,’ Yheng hissed, tears in her eyes – though not in the reflection, because there her eyes were nothing but hollow sockets, sightless and cold.
‘That is one fate,’ said Augury, and their voice became several voices: the demagogue whose name she had forgotten, and Kar-Gatharr. And at the end Tenebrus, and Yheng dared not look behind her, even if she were able, for fear of seeing the sorcerer standing there, as he had in the black chamber.
‘Can this be changed?’ she hissed as the skeletal version of herself cracked, the bones collapsing under their own weight, crumbling into ash. ‘I will change it.’
‘Perhaps, if you will allow us.’
The obsidian mirror rippled like a stone had been cast over its now pristine surface and a new image was revealed.
Yheng saw. Her eyes widened, and slowly her mouth curled into a hungry grin.
Chapter Eighteen
the devil’s road
straits of lunacy
an offering
The beast’s rictus grin gave no hint as to its species when it had been alive. The entire road was littered with them, the bones and half-collapsed carcasses of behemoths. Based on where and how they had fallen, they looked to have been travelling. A pilgrimage of sorts, and one that went on for more miles than Herek could see, a mass migration without an obvious destination. He stooped in the dust to run a finger across a femur.
We are all just bones in the end…
His mood had been maudlin of late, quite unlike him. Another symptom of the burden he carried perhaps? And this place of death did nothing to improve it. Quietude lay across the endless plain, which made ignoring the susurration harder. It practically thrummed now, a chorus of partially indistinct voices both human and inhuman, beckoning, goading, promising… Herek shut his eyes, tried to think. He had his own pilgrimage to make, one that led to Behethramog. His quest, his purpose. The one Augury had given to him. Another of their pieces in the cold war now being waged by the Hand. Retrieving the blade and the shard within, taking it from his fiercest rival, had been but the first step. Now he needed to take the next.
‘Bring him up,’ Herek said, rising to his feet.
The cohort of warriors and cultists behind him stirred. From within their ranks, Vassago Kurgos brought forth the soul mariner. The Navigator had guided them this far with his deranged visions and proclamations. Herek glared as Kurgos threw the Navigator down before him. The hulking chirurgeon had looked pained as he walked and gave a grunt of discomfort, having suffered to reach this far.
‘Is this it? Is this the path you spoke of, the Devil’s Road?’ asked Herek.
‘It had better be…’ murmured Clortho with menace. He, like the rest of the Red Corsairs, had seen better days. His patched armour was dented and scraped, a wound in his side badly clotted. His shoulder guard cleaved. The red and black paint had been scraped away in several places, leaving gunmetal-grey bullet gouges and claw marks. The encounter with the mechanised assassins had not been the last trouble the Red Corsairs had met on this path. To reach this place, some desolate world on the edge of the system, they had fought the malefic. Every time they had sunk into the warp another hellish host had sought ingress onto the ship, stretching their defences. More than once, they had succeeded, drawn to the Ruin like a magnet draws iron filings. Nought but a trickle slipped through the Geller field but enough to cause carnage. It gave Herek no comfort to see his proclamation that they were being hunted by more than just men realised. The fell denizens of the immaterium had come for them, frenzied, rabid and hellbent.
No, not them. Him.
‘Well, speak then, turd,’ Clortho snarled, and swung his heavy mace from his shoulder. The flanges had lost some of their bite, blunted by overuse and from striking iron-hard daemon flesh, but they could crack the Navigator’s skull as easily as an eggshell. He moved stiffly, his injuries still healing.
Herek’s gaze didn’t move from the soul mariner, but he put up his hand to stem the other warlord’s fury.
‘He is…’ said Herek, gesturing to the Navigator, who had his head down and was murmuring into the earth. Over and over, he repeated the litany he had first spoken on the Ruin.
‘Let me ply the Devil’s Road and cross the Straits of Lunacy. At the Burned Spire to the Threefold Wytch and the Abyssal Nadir… It is beauty and horror, and yet there is yearning in me for more.’
He craned his neck all of sudden, as if straining to behold the light of stars he could not see for the iron casing around his head. A brutish instrument of spikes and edges, the helm kept his warp sight shuttered enough that it could not kill anyone.
Following his imaginary eyeline, Herek seized the Navigator by the back of the neck and dragged him to an upthrust shelf of rock that rose several feet above the plain. Once he had reached the plateau he released the wretch.
‘The Devil’s Road,’ he insisted, pain blunting his thoughts. ‘Is this it?’
From this vantage the plain stretched on, the distant skeletons of titanic beasts like mountains against the horizon.
‘I see, I see…’ the Navigator babbled, outstretching a withered arm, fingers clawing at the air as if trying to grasp something only he could perceive. And then back to the litany, only this time he hunched over the ground and began to draw in the dirt with bloodstained fingers: the map, an exact replica of the one from the ship. And when he was finished he began anew, shuffling slightly to the side and drawing it all over again.
Herek, transfixed, felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Kurgos standing behind him. Rathek had broken ranks too and stood not so far away, ever watchful and protective.
‘What does it say?’ asked the chirurgeon.
‘A crude translation would be “Behethramog”.’
‘I have never heard of this place.’
‘Nor I, I know only that we must reach it. The voices speak it endlessly.’ He grimaced, hands clenched.
Kurgos went to his belt of dirty pouches and vials, but Herek warded him off.
‘I am becoming accustomed. Let me bear it.’
A few moments’ silence passed between them with only the moan of the wind to interfere.
‘What use is this, Graeyl?’ asked Kurgos finally, his regard falling on the wretch clawing in the dirt. ‘I see only a madman at work. Please… consider abandoning this fool’s errand.’
Herek’s eyes were like iron. ‘Am I a fool now, old friend?’
Kurgos raised a malformed, partially gauntleted hand. ‘Never that, but I have no wish to see you made into one either. I do not trust the word of daemons and those who speak for them. There are plenty of pickings out in the materium. Let us take ship and reap them.’
The Ruin waited far above them at anchor, in the world’s lower atmosphere. Herek had left a skeleton crew, a handful of trusted Red Corsairs to defend it. The temptation to return to it and do what Kurgos asked pulled hard, but he resisted.
‘I cannot, Vassago. Even if I wanted to. This is the only way now, the path to Behethramog. The affliction will continue – it will worsen – until I reach it. And only then, when I rid myself of this accursed burden, will I see the reward I have been promised.’
Kurgos leaned in close so as not to be overhead, his voice low. ‘We are at a ragged edge. The slaves we took at Felsrath are spent, our losses much worse than expected. I see much risk in this. Perhaps… perhaps there is another way. A means to excise the–’
‘Tell me, old friend,’ Herek interrupted, ‘why did we break our old oaths and kneel before the Tyrant?’
‘Duty to an unjust Imperium is not duty, it is slavery. We wanted freedom, to no longer be slaves. To tread our own path.’
‘And freedom is what I seek. But also the strength to keep it.’
‘To what end? Strength enough to defeat that bastard Templar? You beat him, Graeyl. You killed his beloved brother, you took back the sword and returned the shard.’
‘I don’t care about Morrigan. He licks his wounds, praying for the day when our paths will cross again. His vengeance is all-consuming. I desire ascension, pre-eminence, a path to the Hand and then perhaps… to him. The Warmaster. The eye of the gods is upon us, Vassago, though I have never placed much truck in their favour before. But since the burden, I feel it. We are in their sight and our deeds are being weighed.’
Kurgos’ voice soured. ‘You sound like Clortho…’
‘I need you in this, old friend,’ Herek replied, a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
After a moment, the chirurgeon nodded. ‘Ever have you had me, Herek. I will follow you to the depths of hell and beyond. If that is what it takes. I only hope you see reason before this ends.’
‘None remains, only the Devil’s Road.’
He shared a sad look with Kurgos and knew, whatever fate the gods might mete out, their relationship would be forever changed. Seldom had he gone against the chirurgeon’s counsel, and never over something as fundamental at this.
Rathek merely looked on, confused, unable to read Kurgos’ lips, and Herek with his back to him until he turned again.
‘This is our path,’ he called to his warriors from the rocky shelf, giving a gentle nod of reassurance to Rathek, who still looked uneasy. ‘A Devil’s Road or not, we shall walk it.’
‘Then it will not be alone,’ answered Clortho, who stared off to the side – and only now, as Herek really looked, did he see it. The vaguest impression of faces in the air, near indistinct and thin, like smoke that holds its shape. Talons and claws, tails and scaled limbs, horns and wings. Writhing, pushing against one another. A melange of crowding horrors, pressing against an invisible membrane in this strange and liminal place. Eager and hungry.
‘Daemonkind are here,’ said Clortho.
With little other choice, they walked the road.
And walked…
And walked…
Endless, the parade of bones without cessation.
At the eighth hour, at every eighth hour, they reached the shelf of rock. Again, an infernal loop. After reaching it for the eighth time, Herek called a halt. His armour appeared more tarnished and worn than before, as if entropy worked differently in this place and every maddening revolution of the Devil’s Road only spurred it on. He felt tired, wrung out, as if he had fought for days and weeks without end. Wrenching off his helm, he breathed deep. The still air brought no respite.
Rathek approached, his face a mask of concern. Brother, I can see the toll this is taking, he signed.
‘Once we find a bearing, a way through this labyrinth. Then I’ll rest.’
Not your body, brother, your sanity. The daemonic exacts a heavy price. And its mark, once made, is eternal. Rathek’s eyes darkened with remembered pain. Do not struggle as I have, as I do still. Let me take some of the burden from you.
Herek reached around the back of Rathek’s head and gently pulled their foreheads together until they touched.
‘Know this, I would rather have no others at my side than you and Kurgos.’ He spoke slowly, so that Rathek could read his lips. ‘My will and my conscience. Have no fear for me, brother, this malaise will pass. It must pass. And the burden is mine alone. I would not see you suffer again. You have already given enough for us. Let me do this.’
