Hand of abaddon, p.40
Hand Of Abaddon, page 40
He was deep into this process when he heard the faintest cry. It was high-pitched, an animalistic call. He had heard it before. Heart beating loudly, he summoned a crackle of dark lightning to his fingertips. The spell took a toll; it was harder to manifest than comparatively simple biomancy.
It didn’t have eyes, the thing that regarded him from the shadows. Rather, it smelled him, turning its nasal pits to the air and taking in a sucking breath. It was gangly, its limbs pallid and taut with rangy muscle. It shuffled towards him, hunched over and with an apelike gait. Tenebrus recognised the ur-ghul, one of the denizens of the fortress. A wretched creature, killing it would be a mercy.
The lightning spark swelled as he prepared to unleash it, but as it grew it lit the room around it, and Tenebrus saw then that the ur-ghul was not alone. It had brought its kin, the ones from the amphitheatre, the ones who had come to witness Yheng’s ascension.
Hundreds of them, gathering in the dark. One cry became many, a sharp and hungry drone that filled the chamber even as they advanced on him.
‘Oh, gods…’ breathed Tenebrus as the light faded and the creatures lunged, tearing him limb from limb.
The light came and went, warm and red at first then cold like ice. Herek felt his body dragged, a hand fastened around his ankle. Through sand, through water that smelled like metal and then upwards, a rope, a chain around his waist.
And then blackness, as all meaning of time faded, and him with it.
Until…
He awoke on a slab of metal, the air thick with mist and edged with chill. He was naked but for a cloth to hide his modesty, his many wounds exposed. Some of them had been stitched and cauterised.
A face resolved before him, malformed, riddled with lesions and ugly masses.
‘Kurgos…’ he croaked, recognising his chirurgeon. He took a breath, and it felt like shattered glass raking his lungs. ‘Rathek… he’s dead. I killed him, brother.’
‘I know.’
‘The blade… I lost it. Taken…’ As he remembered, his anger began to harden to a sharp point.
‘I know.’
He tried to rise, but Kurgos held him down with a strong hand.
‘You are still weak, brother. Rest. Heal.’ He wheezed then, betraying his own hurts. ‘We all must heal. Clortho is alive – take that for a blessing or a curse as you see fit. I am in the process of replacing your missing hand. This bionic is less refined than the one you lost, but it will serve.’
‘Where is my armour?’
‘Gone, I am afraid, without hope of recovery. Another suit is being prepared. There was plenty of spare war plate for the task,’ Kurgos added grimly.
‘How did you survive, chirurgeon?’
‘I refused to die. I am hard to kill, brother. Like you.’ Kurgos busied himself at his instrument table. ‘You were murmuring in your sleep. Babbling, really. Saints and priestesses, a throne in flames.’
Herek remembered, and his flesh-and-blood hand flexed its fingers at the absence of the sword. ‘I want it back. Rathek gave his life for that sword. It is mine.’
‘And if the ones who have it refuse to return it?’ asked Kurgos, as he paused in his ministrations.
‘Then we take it,’ vowed Herek, ‘and kill anyone who gets in our way.’
Only three remained, where once there had been eight.
They gathered on a desolate promontory under a slate-grey sky. Creatures hunted in that bleak expanse and on the ash plains below, but none dared approach the three. It had been inhabited once, this world, but that was long ago and only tortured ghosts existed here now. The degraded shells of cities persisted too, but these were down in the valley, far from the heath and the hill.
The Host of Masks bowed to the Wretched Prince, a mocking gesture, his face wearing an overlong grin. An assassin preferred to fight from the shadows; it had no interest in open warfare. The Prince said nothing, merely wrapped his ragged cloak closer to his withered frame, his coven of witchlings lurking nearby, and sought out the third of their order.
This one came through the ether, subsisting on the tortured souls of the dead city. Its feasts had been frugal and the Sin of Six Knives looked all the weaker for it. It regarded the others hungrily but would dare not act against them.
Another survivor, unlooked for, climbed onto the hill, and the three became four. Half of the original covenant. Her robes were singed and black. She gained the craggy summit with difficulty, pain evident on her burned face. She appraised them all with cool disdain, breathless from her climb.
‘I am now First amongst us,’ she declared.
‘What of Tenebrus?’ the Wretched Prince enquired in a reedy, despicable voice.
‘Tenebrus is dead. I am First. Do any of you wish to gainsay?’
None did. Even the Host of Masks was content to bow, and did so with courtly poise.
‘Then I have two edicts,’ said the Iron Magus with a determination that bordered on anger. ‘Replenish our ranks, and slaughter the ones who betrayed us.’
Appendix: Notes on the Crusade
the blackstone fortresses
Humanity is not the first species to claim dominance over the heavens. Scattered throughout the galaxy are artefacts created by creatures long fallen into obscurity or extinction. Many of these objects are little more than curios of interest only to the technoarchaeologists of Mars and the historitors of Terra. Alas, war has ever stained the light of the stars with blood. The debris of past conflicts is found everywhere, and hidden within it are many powerful weapons. Among the most deadly of these relics are the battle stations known as the Blackstone Fortresses.
ancient armaments
A Blackstone Fortress is an immense, warp-capable vessel bigger than most Imperial battle stations and armed with warp-based weaponry potent enough to destroy a world. When the fortresses were first encountered, the strange obsidian-like material they were built from was initially unknown, and defied efforts to analyse it. One of the least problems this novel stone presented was dating the fortresses. Imperial scholars put their ages at anywhere between tens of thousands and tens of millions of years old, though current thinking tends to the more extreme end of these estimations. The aeldari call them the Talismans of Vaul, and their legends say they are relics of the long-ago War in Heaven. The mythic cycle of the aeldari tells that this galaxy-shattering war was fought between their gods and the evil C’tan, gods born from the stars, who were the masters of the necrontyr.
the gothic war
Mankind first encountered the Blackstone Fortresses in the Gothic Sector, where six were discovered adrift and powerless in the stars. The fortresses at that time were completely inert, their true capabilities unguessed at. The Imperium nevertheless saw their potential as deep-space Naval bases. The Adeptus Mechanicus gleaned enough knowledge to access the fortresses’ semi-dormant energy systems, tapping into them to provide power for retrofitted Imperial facilities. Human-built defence turrets, command centres and star docks soon encrusted the fortresses’ ancient hulls, and for a time they served the Imperium well.
This did not last. Another galactic power had an eye on these machines. Abaddon the Despoiler launched his Twelfth Black Crusade into the Gothic Sector in early M41 with the express aim of securing as many of the Blackstone Fortresses as possible. War raged throughout space. Abaddon secured three of the six. Somehow, the son of Horus had learned how to unlock the fortresses’ full potential. Once awoken, the fortresses sloughed off their Imperial additions, their engines came online, and their awful weaponry was activated. Abaddon soon demonstrated that just one of these gargantuan battle stations was capable of destroying a world. Yet that was not the limit of their power, for their weaponry’s warp-beams could be combined, and Abaddon used this ability of his new prizes to destroy the star of the Taranis System.
Harried by a vast armada of aeldari and Imperial ships, Abaddon retreated back to the Eye of Terror. One of the three Blackstone Fortresses seized by Chaos was boarded by Imperial forces and retaken. However, the moment the ship fell back into Imperial hands, it and the other three remaining under Imperial control disintegrated utterly, leaving the last two in the hands of the Archenemy.
the fall of cadia
Hundreds of years later, Abaddon’s Blackstone Fortresses were once more seen in Imperial space. One, Abaddon gave to Huron Blackheart to secure the aid of the Red Corsairs, who have since adopted it as a major base in the Maelstrom. The other, dubbed the Will of Eternity, was heavily damaged by the Imperial Fists fortress-battleship Phalanx over Cadia. Abaddon had the crippled fortress crashed into the surface of the bastion world, shattering it utterly, breaking the necron pylon network, and finally opening the Cadian Gate to the forces of Chaos.
blackstone fortresses today
The six fortresses of the Gothic Sector were the only known examples for a long time. Yet in recent years others have come to light. Of course, verification of these reports in the Era Indomitus is nigh on impossible, but there are possibly four or more Blackstone Fortresses in the galaxy currently known to the Imperium.
One has been positively identified far to the west of the Segmentum Pacificus. Surrounded by a ship graveyard a million miles across, this seventh fortress seems to be active and awake. It is possessed by an ancient machine intelligence that is able to reconfigure the vessel’s internal layout at will, and is defended by a number of automata. Even so, there are many who brave these dangers, and the creatures and renegades who have made the fortress their home, for the fortress’ passageways are scattered with archeotech of the highest value from myriad spacefaring species. From the void-city of Precipice, humans and xenos alike plumb its sinister depths for treasure.
From the experiences of Imperial boarding crew in the Gothic War, the adventurers of Precipice and the testimony of Roboute Guilliman himself, who was held prisoner for a time aboard the fortress of the Red Corsairs, a clearer picture of the true nature of the fortresses has begun to emerge. Firstly, it is now widely agreed that the vessels are made from the material noctilith, colloquially referred to in Low Gothic as ‘blackstone’. Indeed, these ships were the first place that noctilith was encountered. Because of a commonality in substance, it is suspected that the fortresses share some kinship with the equally ancient necron pylons. It is also probable that when operating correctly, each Blackstone Fortress possesses its own alien abominable intelligence, which, according to some unsubstantiated reports, can be usurped by a sufficiently powerful daemon. The sainted primarch tells that the core of the fortress he escaped from had multiple portals into the webway, including gates big enough to take voidships. Whether this is because the fortresses were made by the aeldari as some historians assert, or by the race of their long-disappeared masters, is hotly debated. All that is truly known is that the Blackstone Fortresses are ancient, powerful and terrible weapons, and that the galaxy would be a safer place if they did not exist at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Kyme is the author of many Horus Heresy novels, novellas and audio dramas, including Old Earth, Promethean Sun and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection The Primarchs. For Warhammer 40,000, Nick has written Volpone Glory and the Dawn of Fire novel The Iron Kingdom. He is also well known for his popular Salamanders series and the Cato Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge. His work for Age of Sigmar includes the short story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm, and the audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel Sepulturum. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from The Lion: Son of the Forest.
The river sings silver notes: a perpetual, chaotic babble in which a fantastically complex melody seems to hang, tantalising, just out of reach of the listener. He could spend eternity here trying to find the heart of it, without ever succeeding, yet still not consider the time wasted. The sound of water over stone, the interplay of energy and matter, creates a quiet symphony that is both unremarkable and unique. He does not know how long he has been here, just listening.
Nor, he realises, does he know where here is.
The listener becomes aware of himself in stages, like a sleeper passing from the deepest, darkest depths of slumber, through the shallows of semi-consciousness where thought swirls in confusing eddies, and then into the light. First comes the realisation that he is not the song of the river; that he is in fact separate from it, and listening to it. Then sensation dawns, and he realises he is sitting on the river’s bank. If there is a sun, or suns, then he cannot see them through the branches of the trees overhead and the mist that hangs heavily in the air, but there is still light enough for him to make out his surroundings.
The trees are massive, and mighty, with great trunks that could not be fully encircled by one, two, perhaps even half a dozen people’s outstretched arms. Their rough, cracked bark pockmarks them with shadows, as though the trees themselves are camouflaged. The ground beneath their branches is fought over by tough shrubs: sturdy, twisted, thorny things strangling each other in the contest for space and light, like children unheeded at the feet of adults. The earth in which they grow is dark and rich, and when the listener digs his fingers into it, it smells of life, and death, and other things besides. It is a familiar smell, although he cannot say from where, or why.
His fingers, he realises as they penetrate the ground, are armoured. His whole body is armoured, in fact, encased in a great suit of black plates with the faintest hint of dark green. This is a familiar sensation, too. The armour feels like a part of him – an extension, as natural as the shell of any crustacean that might lurk in the nooks and crannies of the river in front of him. He leans forward and peers down into the still water next to the bank, sheltered from the main flow by an outcropping just upstream. It becomes an almost perfect mirror surface, as smooth as a dream.
The listener does not recognise the face that looks back at him. It is deeply lined, as though a world of cares and worries has washed over it like the river water, scoring the marks of their passage into the skin. His hair is pale, streaked with blond here and there, but otherwise fading into grey and white. The lower part of his face is obscured by a thick, full beard and moustache, leaving only the lips bare; it is a distrustful mouth, one more likely to turn downwards in disapproval than quirk upwards in a smile.
He raises one hand, the fingers still smeared with dirt, before his face. The reflection does the same. This is surely his face, but the sight sparks no memory. He does not know who he is, and he does not know where he is, for all that it feels familiar.
That being the case, there seems little point in remaining here.
The listener gets to his feet, then hesitates. He cannot explain to himself why he should move, given the song of the river is so beautiful. However, the realisation of his lack of knowledge has opened something inside him, a hunger which was not there before. He will not be satisfied until he has answers.
Still, the river’s song calls to him. He decides to walk along the bank, following the flow of the water and listening to it as he goes, and since he does not know where he is, one direction is as good as the other. There is a helmet on the bank, next to where he was sitting. It is the same colour as his armour, with vertical slits across the mouth, like firing slits in a wall. He picks it up, and clamps it to his waist with a movement that feels instinctual.
He does not know for how long he walks. Time is surely passing, in that one moment slips into another, and he can remember ones that came before and consider the concept of ones yet to come, but there is nothing to mark it. The light neither increases nor decreases, instead remaining an almost spectral presence which illuminates without revealing its source. Shadows lurk, but there is no indication as to what casts them. The walker is unperturbed. His eyes can pierce those shadows, just as he can smell foliage, and he can hear the river. There is no soughing of wind in the branches, for the air is still, but the moist air carries the faint hooting, hollering calls of animals of some kind, somewhere in the distance.
The river’s course begins to flatten and widen. The walker follows it around a bend, then comes to a halt in shock.
On the far bank stands a building.
It is built of cut and dressed stone, a dark blue-grey rock in which brighter specks glitter. It is not immense – the surrounding trees tower over it – but it is solid. It is a castle of some kind, a fortress, intended to keep the unwanted out and whatever people and treasures lie within safe from harm. It is neither new and pristine, nor ancient and weathered. It looks as though it has always stood here, and always shall. And on the wide, calm water in front of it sits a boat.
It is small, wooden, and unpainted. It is large enough for one person, and indeed one person is sitting in it. The walker’s eyes can make him out, even at distance. He is old, and not old in the same way as the walker’s face is. Time has not lined his features, it has ravaged them. His cheeks are sunken, his limbs are wasted; skin that was once clearly a rich chestnut now has an ashen patina, and his long hair is lifeless, dull grey, and matted. However, that grey head supports a crown: little more than a circlet of gold, but a crown nonetheless.
In his hands, swollen of knuckle and weak of grip, he holds a rod. The line is already cast into the water. Now he sits, hunched over as though in pain, a small, ancient figure in a small, simple boat.
