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Unification – Chris Wraight

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The lords of Silence’

A Black Library Publication

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Unification

Chris Wraight

Another world, falling like rotten fruit from the low branches. One by one, they all land in the gape of the Crusade’s embrace.

Vorx can’t even pronounce this one’s name properly – Oura’Nuoama, or something – it was named by aliens. These xenos have mouths like flutes. Wings too, gossamer things that catch the orange light of the swollen sun. And they have guns and particle-beams, and atmospheric ships hovering on blush-blue downdrafts as they swivel to burn the air apart.

Wings. What affectation, thinks Vorx. What decadence.

The planet will fall very soon. Its palaces of frosted glass are broken; its seas now foam with the wine-coloured blood of the slain. Heavy attack platforms squat in the world’s airs, blackened and leaking smoke. Already the terraformers are moving in from low orbit, bringing down their city-sized chem-units to sizzle the oceans away and burn out the toxins in the air.

They are only toxins, mind, for human lungs. The xenos breathed in this filth quite happily for centuries, and now the surviving ones can only watch as the Crusade fleets turn their cherished biosphere into a hostile place of charred rocks and boiled-down seas.

Their spirit is broken, thinks Vorx. Their neck is snapped.

Soon they will be a memory only, save for the technical records kept by the Mechanicum and, secretly, by himself.

Such was the threat posed by Oura’Nuoama, at least as gauged by Terra’s distant generals, that two Legions were sent to snuff it out. The first, in greater numbers, was the Death Guard, well known throughout the growing Imperium for their resistance to poison and strangeness. The second, the smaller contingent, was the Blood Angels, a more palatable choice, admired by the right people and feared by the wrong ones. Everyone on Terra loves the Blood Angels, it is believed.

Vorx, as ever, made careful study of the numbers before deployment. The Death Guard had sent its Third Great Company under Venarus Graganda, currently standing at 11,450 warriors, of which he himself was Captain of the Second Cohort, a force of 678 fighters. The Blood Angels Legion, spread out across a wider array of engagements, could only spare two Chapters, amounting to a little more than two thousand Space Marines. That could have been seen as insulting, or it could have been the best result possible under trying conditions – Vorx can guess how his primarch took it.

But they are all fighting now, all down on the surface, cracking the last of the bones under their muddy boots. The sky has turned a deep red, discoloured by the terraformers’ world-engines activating, and the Blood Angels look like dark ghosts in the nimbus. The Death Guard are everywhere, clambering up long defiles with their ivory battleplate streaked and blotched. Two kilometres to the west, where the Last City’s pinnacle rears up in smoke and flame, a tank squadron is making an impressive mess of some intricately wrought siege gates. There are a few flyers pummelling at high-ranged artillery points, but this is now, as ever, about infantry closing the noose. They advance slowly, mercilessly, letting their armour take particle-beam hits, gradually coming into range to open up with bolter and blade. There is no hurry. Slowness allows fear to breed, to spread into and cripple the enemy, so that by the time they crest the ramparts, the xenos are already half beaten.

Allies advance on Vorx’s right flank. Their armour is dark in the swirls of choking fyceline, limned with gold that glints with every new mortar starburst.

Vorx thinks this is stupid. His own battleplate is as grimy as the churned-up earth below them. He is virtually invisible against the terrain, allowing it to cake him with filth, to cover him and hide him. The Blood Angels have attempted to keep the worst of it from engulfing them. Their heraldry is still proudly distinct, picked out in inlaid bronze or painted in clear, glittering lines. They go into battle in the open, confident of repelling anything that confronts them. Perhaps that is their home world speaking – Vorx has heard it is a place of plains, of open skies, not like the misty swamps he grew up in.

Their captain is called Camanio. The two of them have exchanged few words since launching the assault, but now they are marching almost neck and neck. Vorx can see that Camanio is making assessments of his own. That is as it should be – soon the joint spearhead will be breaking through those tottering walls, and all need to know the quality of those they fight alongside.

The Blood Angel ducks fractionally, allowing a particle-beam to shriek past his right pauldron. He looses a single shot from his own weapon – a Volkite serpenta with a chased barrel – and a distant explosion confirms another kill.

‘Fine shot,’ Vorx grunts, feeling, uncharacteristically, as if some contact between them should be established.

Camanio bows as he trudges, hauling himself through the knee-deep mud and searching for the next target. Something in his gestures gives away distaste. He would rather be moving freely, charging in close, and his impatience is like a musk around him.

Vorx does not fire yet. He has his close weapon held ready – a heavy gladius, notched from repeated use and not yet re-honed by the armourers.

‘Damned stinking world,’ Camanio grunts.

Vorx had not even registered a stink, unless Camanio means the ones they brought with them – the spilled promethium, the chemical tang of the heavy weapons. They haven’t even deployed phosphex here, or the biological agents that they used to such good effect on Promada IV.

The walls inch closer, flickering with ill-aimed defensive fire. ‘It will fall soon enough,’ Vorx says, attempting to forge a link again. He does not know why he does this. It feels important, perhaps, to counter the disdain that leaks from the sons of Baal.

Any potential reply is cut off by a sudden flash of greenish light over towards the eastern flank of the assault, where a formation of bound Knights has pinned back the last remnants of the xenos’ heavy armour. All turn for a moment to look, for they know what that detonation must mean – they can taste the sour note of the teleport beacon’s warp-locus and feel the sudden drop in temperature.

The primarch is there, there, less than a kilometre away, surrounded by his Deathshroud in their hulking, frost-encrusted plate. Even at a distance, his presence is absurdly dominating, slewing the entire battle about its axis. His dun-grey cloak whirls about him as he strides into contact, gilded with the last traces of translation energy. He is tall, lean, pale, an outline of gaunt strength. Vorx finds himself pausing, absorbed, before glancing back at Camanio.

The Blood Angel is wearing his helm, and so his expression is hidden. Vorx hears the faint crackle-hum of a vox-bead in use and guesses he is saying something to his squad.

‘Magnificent,’ Vorx offers, trying a third and last time to build a bridge between them. ‘The primarch accompanies us. We are honoured indeed.’

Then Camanio turns, properly, shifting his weight onto his front foot, which sinks into the sucking mire. He comes closer. ‘My warriors are asking me, how can anyone follow that skin-and-bones wretch and call him “primarch”? I do not know what to tell them.’

Vorx does not react, stunned. Camanio is already moving again. He is advancing, pushing on towards the joint objective. His words ring in Vorx’s ears – aristocratic, the casual contempt slithering from them. For a moment, Vorx considers taking the blade to him, crashing him to the ground and wrenching those words back out from that over-proud mouth.

His warriors advance on all sides, unaware. They trudge just as they always have, uncomplaining, efficient, closing on the goal. They have the task ahead of them, one now witnessed by the primarch himself.

Skin-and-bones wretch.

Vorx moves again, anger swilling like hot oil in his veins. He picks up the pace, determined to remain close to Camanio when the walls are breached.

I do not know what to tell them.

The ignorance, Vorx thinks darkly. The ignorance.

Another world, clouded by a mist that never rises. It gets into your bones. It is as thick as blood, and pools into droplets against a frost-hard ground.

The nights are long, an age of darkness followed by too-brief days of grey shadow. Mould cakes the stone, spreading in dark spider-lines. There are no places free of the dank – the fires gutter and spit, fuelled by wet, rotten wood, coughing out more smoke than flame and making the infants huddled around them hack.

You are always aware, always, of the peaks above you. They are hidden in the milky shrouds of condensate, but their bulk and impossible height are ever present, a mental pressure that crushes and deadens, slowing movement and crippling resolve. Cold air tumbles down from the heights in steady procession, sinking into the sodden lowlands, smothering every attempt to lift the heaviness out of life.

Vorx crouches at the corner of his family holding, a crooked spike held in one skinny hand. He is shivering, and there is a steady film of moisture running down his arm. Avorn, his father, is out in the open, carrying the long scythe used for reaping the pale corn. Klev, his mother, huddles on the far side of the straw-logged yard with a broken-shafted hammer. The rest of the village has also taken position – squatting beside the low stone walls, pressed against black wooden doorframes, hunkered down in the rotting hayricks. Twenty-five, all told.

A frigid wind blows from the heights, stirring the rags and straw-totems that dot the perimeter. A skinny dog limps into the shadows, knowing what’s coming, head low and tail tucked tight between its haunches.

Sometimes Vorx whispers to himself. He recalls the names his mother taught him, the old line of the family stretching back into the past that is myth. Or he tries to rehearse the principles given to him by his father – the hours and shifts of the perilous calendar, the days one must harvest and the dates one must sow. This frozen world is brutal to those who cannot keep track of the seasons, and so the numbers of cultivation have become sacred.

His lips, cracked and cold, move silently. The third of Rethen. The seventh of Ar-Manth. All in by the thirteenth of Kanand.

He hates his weakness. The people of the settlements preach the virtues of silence and stillness. The silent are passed over by the Pale Kings. The still are missed by their searching eyes. If he were stronger, his lips would be pressed tight and motionless, his fingers would not tremble, his heart would not be drumming in his scrawny chest.

Ahead of him, beyond the dirt-sunk margins of this hardscrabble place, the air sighs. Black grass shivers, weighed down by dew and brushed by frigid currents. Vorx can see no more than a dozen metres or so into the murk. This is not a world where you expect to see anything much beyond the reach of your arms. You must labour on your feet through the fog and endure whatever trials you come across.

Greda is moving now, hoisting her heavy skirts and shuffling over to the byre. She has a cudgel in her calloused hand, and that gives Vorx a treacherous spike of optimism. Greda is a good fighter, her bones free of the marrow-rot. She is old – more than thirty years, they tell him – and that is an achievement to inspire hope.

He tries to still the shaking. He inclines his head, listening hard. It is impossible to determine what lurks in that fog – it hisses, it slithers, it sends false voices to lure you in. For a moment, he catches nothing, just the sibilant drag of the icy air, the rub of the grasses.

Then he feels it – the first faint tremor. He sees Avorn tense, and Klev cups the head of the hammer in her grey palm.

Another tremor – the soil shifts, a muffled thud rolls out of the gloom. He is sweating now, his perspiration mingling with icy condensation. He pushes back the thick cowl that they all wear, peering out at the blankness, hoping that nothing will emerge from it but knowing that something will.

When the Pale King shows itself, he can barely stifle a scream. It is huge, only loosely man-shaped and proportioned, the outsized stuff of horror-dreams, limping on two misshapen legs and clad in stiff rags. It has a long, bloodless face, drooping like thrown cream, a mouth that twists into an unbalanced kind of dewy smile. Its eyes are filmy and pupil-free, its fingers longer than Vorx’s forearm.

It slides fully into view, towering over the buildings. It seems blind, shambling aimlessly. Its lips part, and a white tongue briefly licks out, tasting the air.

Vorx starts counting again. The ninth of Tonedd. No planting in Urdh. Harvest by the second of… when? He cannot remember. Terror has gripped him like a claw. The Pale King is coming closer, its robes swinging. A carrion stench precedes it, rolling slowly across the glistening earth.

Greda is going to move. He can see her coiling into a ball. Others are making ready too, their faces tight with fear. Twenty-five – not nearly enough. They might be a hundred strong, and it would not be enough for a Pale King.

He must do his part. He must not freeze with fear. He must fight with his family and drive the terror back into the mist. If he is to die, it will not be as a coward but as a fighter. This is all that matters now.

The Pale King lurches clumsily towards them, its claws sinking deep into the mulch. Mist slews from its shoulders, and it reaches out for the nearest thatched roof.

Greda is first, bursting from her hiding place and screaming at it. The rest come with her then, men and women, boys, girls, all screaming. The Pale King does not scream back. It makes no sound at all, but smiles, smiles, smiles.

Vorx runs too. His heart feels like it is racing out of control, and if he doesn’t grip the spike hard he will drop it. He stumbles, his foot catching on a tussock and twisting. By the time he gets up the others are hacking at the Pale King, trying to slash at its huge feet. He can only watch as Greda is swatted aside, thrown bodily into the walls of the threshing barn. He can only watch as Hobol is crushed by those claws and Lurt has his chest cracked. He is too late for his father, who is driven face down into the mire by a heavy stamp. All gone in only moments, and yet still the rest of them swarm towards the same fate.

Vorx shouts, blaring out horror and fury and anguish in his cracking child’s voice. His vision is blinded with hot tears, and he slashes with the spike, snagging on a trailing line of rain-heavy fabric. The Pale King slowly twists, staring blearily down at him, and Vorx can see the deep-puckered flesh of its face, moonlight-white, bovine-stupid, heavy folds of loose skin quivering as it moves.

Vorx springs right at it, swinging wildly. That is ludicrous – he cannot reach high enough – but he leaps anyway, knowing the claws are coming for him. He screws his eyes closed. He cannot look into that face – he is a child, and the terror is so very great.

In later days, in later years, he will never remember how the next thing happened. He will not recall if he even landed a blow, or if he was kicked away and sent skidding through the mud. This part is hazy. The moment, this moment, when the balance of fate tripped over, is vague to him forever, clouded like the stagnant mists that birthed it.

But he remembers the newcomer’s face emerging from the fog, cowled just like a human’s, grey and drawn, the skin sucked tight over lean bones. Vorx is on the ground by then, his breath knocked from him, his eyes staring. The newcomer is striding into battle, crashing out of nowhere, swinging a scythe like Vorx’s father did, two-handed, back and forth.

He is huge – not as huge as the Pale King, but far greater than any mortal man, and the power in those reaping arcs is incredible. He has already wounded the Pale King, cut it open, spilling a mass of entrails over its flabby stomach. And he is not stopping – he is pressing on, driving it back, goading it. The Pale King tries to respond but it is too slow, too slack, and its smiles are ripped from it.

Vorx gets up, his lungs burning. He is bleeding, but barely feels it. The spike is still in his hand and he tries to use it, jabbing at the Pale King’s monstrous foot.

His efforts are useless, but he keeps at it, trying to drive the sharp point in. The newcomer is unbelievably fast, unbelievably strong, whirling around and sending his cloaks flying like flails. The Pale King is lowing now, blubbering, weeping blood. Impossibly, it is being killed.

Others of the settlement see this and join the attack. Suddenly, they are hunters, not fodder. They strike out, barely believing they are doing it, and the Pale King reels away, bewildered by the change.

In truth, however, none of them matter. Vorx does not matter. It is this newcomer who is doing the work. He is singlehandedly carving the monster into ribbons, using that scythe in ways Vorx has never dreamed possible. He harries it back into the fog. He cuts it apart in there, throwing out specks of blood that halt and shiver on the stones.

Eventually, the bellowing dies out. The whoosh of that great steel sickle stills. Mist closes over the scene of carnage, as if abashed by it. Vorx is on his knees, exhausted, staring into the murk. The rest of the survivors stare at one another.

Vorx begins to wonder if it has been some kind of cruel dream. He begins to wonder if the newcomer was a phantom sent from the heights, just another trick played by this world that loathes them. But then the cowled figure re-emerges, unbowed, tall as a sheaf of uncut corn. He looks barely troubled by his exertions. His hood has fallen back a little, revealing grey, smooth flesh. It is the most beautiful face Vorx has ever seen – like theirs, but as hard and clean as a stone.

The newcomer looks directly at Vorx, and the intensity in the yellow eyes makes him want to blush, or laugh, or burst into tears.

‘Bravely done,’ says the newcomer.

Vorx cannot reply. He feels as if his heart will burst.

But then he remembers the death. He had seen his father killed, and he rushes to find the body. He sees quickly that his mother is motionless, along with many others – he is an orphan now, and that is as good as a death for him too. Now the cold becomes unbearable. He looks one way, then the next, and every view sinks him further into desperation.

Vorx expects the newcomer to leave then – there is nothing to keep him here, for the settlement, having been stripped of its best workers, will likely wither long before the winter. But he does not. He remains with them, lifting the wounded from the earth and carrying them back to what remains of the shelter. Vorx hangs back, on the verge of shameful tears, not knowing what to do or where to go.

Eventually, the survivors gather in the old courtyard. Rygan, the headman, too blind and ill to fight, shuffles down to his knees before the newcomer, but is prevented by the gentle extension of a giant hand.

‘No kneeling,’ the newcomer says. ‘The time for that is long over.’ He turns to the rest of them. ‘I show you a new way. The way of endurance. You have no weapons – I will give you weapons. You have no armour – I forge armour that does not fail. You are sickened.’ He smiles, and it is chilling. ‘That, too, can be a strength.’

They are hanging on his words. His voice is strangely soft, thin like a gust of rain-frozen wind, but it is pure with conviction. Vorx has never heard a voice like it.

‘There are many gathering,’ the newcomer says. ‘Every valley is moving. They have divided you for too long, keeping you from discovering one another. Together, unbroken, you can be mightier than you know. Join me, and fear no witchery again.’

Vorx looks at the rest of them, his throat tight with hope. For a moment, he thinks they will rise up, raise their crude weapons into the drizzle and declare allegiance there and then.

But this is a beaten place, populated by beaten people. Rygan glances over at the survivors, hunched and bloody in the fog, and there is no fight left in him.

‘We thank you, lord,’ he says weakly. ‘You have our loyalty, for what remains of our lives. But the fields…’ He trails off. ‘We must build again.’

The newcomer looks down at Rygan. Then he looks at the rest of them. There is no scorn in that slender face, just appraisal, just judgement. In the end, he nods. He reaches up to his cowl and pulls the fabric back over his head.

‘The choice is made,’ he says.

Then he turns and strides back along the rutted path. As he goes, the heel of his scythe sinks deep into the slurry. It only takes a few moments for him to fade into nothingness again, sighing into that great white miasma that forever surrounds the settlement and hems it in.

Vorx watches the whole time. Of all the horror, that is almost the worst. Now the deaths mean nothing at all. Now that brief, terrible window of defiance has closed again. By the time he turns back, he can see the survivors limping over to Rygan, congratulating him. They are already talking of replanting, of rebuilding the walls that were torn down but never kept anything out even when they stood.

As he stares at the meagre crowd, a vivid certainty flashes before him, as sharp and clear as all else is muffled. He sees the settlement limping on, the vice of starvation clamping tighter around it, the ribcages becoming ever more scrawny, and a slow death coming, without honour and without resistance, albeit comforting and understandable. For they have always been weak and cannot be expected to fight, and must accept with equanimity whatever comes their way, for it is the will of the universe.

And that is the greatest horror of all. Even before he really understands what he is doing, Vorx is pushing himself back to his feet, turning, slipping in the grime and scrabbling towards the perimeter. He hears voices calling his name but does not turn back. He sees where his father’s body lies and does not return to it. He stumbles further out, through the churned fields with their black rows of barren soil and leafless trees.

It is hard to run far in that country – the mud is too thick and the air is too foul – so he marches as fast as his young legs will bear him, head down, suppressing the tears that would burst free if he thought for a moment of what he is leaving behind. He can see the deep marks of the scythe’s heel running before him, scoring out the path to follow, and he locks his mind on to it.

The way becomes hard very quickly. The ground rises and sharpens, and soon he is in country he does not know. The rocks are greasy, the wind like a knife. His clothes become leaden with moisture, and they hang slick across his shaking skin.

He cannot retain his sense of certainty for long. His feet keep moving but soon doubts crowd in, sapping his energy and draining the will from him. Still he does not look back, for he knows that if he does, he will see the last of everything comforting and familiar, and that will break him.

Head down, legs lifting. Time slows to a pain-filled crawl. His shivering becomes a shuddering, his breath becomes shallow and rapid. The ground keeps on rising, ever rising, and the air spoils into an acrid haze that stings his lips.

By the end, he is on his knees, panting like a dog. He understands the folly of his actions and the wisdom of Rygan’s, but now there is nothing to do but persevere. His palms are cut raw, his knees stripped of skin, but he keeps going.

He does not ever discover how long the newcomer was watching him before the end. There are some questions best not asked, though he thinks now it must have been many hours. By the time the figure intervenes, lifting Vorx carefully from the acid-washed rock and pressing a woollen mask doused in something herbal over his mouth and nose, he can barely see or hear. He glimpses a blurry image of that stone-hard face up close, just as before.

‘If you do not turn back, this will never end,’ he says. ‘This pain. Are you strong enough?’

Vorx takes a strained breath and feels the cut of the world’s spite in his throat.

‘Make me strong enough,’ he says.

After that, so many wonders. There are walls, made not of mouldering mud bricks but of stone hewn from the mountain’s heart. There are blades polished to a keen edge. There are plates of hardened leather, stitched together and caulked, that form a shell tough enough to turn the blunt knives of the Pale armies. In strongholds that rear up from the storm-lashed shoulders of the high peaks, masks are fashioned that siphon the worst of the poison from the air. The smiths – men and women from the valleys, now housed in these fortresses – work incessantly, stopping only for sleep and sustenance, dragged from weary indolence and imbued with an almost fanatical enthusiasm.

Vorx recovers fast. He is taken up, fed and given lodgings with other boys. They train him, hardening his muscles and turning his wiry frame into a steel-trap instrument. Most of those in the gathering armies are young. They all look much the same – hollow cheeks, concave stomachs, blackened lips and eyelids – but they get stronger the longer they stay here.

One day, being taught how to use the long harvester’s scythe in combat, he asks for the name of the newcomer, the one they are already calling the Deathlord in honour of his prowess in battle.

‘Mortarion,’ said his instructor, Flaunn, a thick-legged woman from a deep coomb on the far side of the high ranges. ‘Never let him hear you say it – it was given to him by one he hates.’

‘Why not choose another?’

‘You do not choose a name,’ she says, cuffing him. ‘It chooses you. Now prepare, or I’ll cut you at the elbows.’

So Vorx did not change his own name to mark his passage into a new life, even though it was given to him by a slaved and cowed people, and it followed him out into the stars. All those who passed the trial of the Legion after him kept their marks of subjugation as a reminder, and as a warning.

But that time is to come. For now, he is learning, soaking up knowledge and distilling it into something he can use. He picks things up fast. At first he did so to crowd out the thoughts of home from his mind, but that instinct is soon replaced by learning for its own sake. He finds that his memory is superb, and he catalogues the armouries, the inventories, the types of armour and the number of troops in every division of the Deathlord’s burgeoning army.

Mortarion himself knows things that cannot have been learned on this world, Vorx suspects. He uses terms such as ‘cohort’ and ‘maniple’ that sound strange on their lips. Vorx learns that the world has a name, Barbarus, though he does not discover where it came from and surmises that Mortarion has called it this as a result of something like contempt.

Of course, the intellectual leap involved in naming a world anything other than ‘earth’ or ‘world’ implies that there are other such places of a similar scale. There is no evidence for this, and Mortarion has not proposed any such hypothesis. But it makes the gathered people think. It makes them imagine a time when the courses of all the valleys might be known, and then charted, and then conquered. It makes them think of a time when the whole of their reality might be consolidated, locked down under the banner of the Deathlord, and where the mists will no longer harbour nightmares.

It makes them think that, one day, the shadow of the Old Night will be lifted forever. It makes them think that a new age of unity might dawn for them all.

It is not long before Vorx is fighting again, this time with proper weapons. He dons his leather armour and wears the close-fitting mask with gauze over his mouth and nose. He takes up his modified version of the harvester’s scythe, a popular choice among his comrades. The fortress gates grind open, and then he is marching in close ranks with his fellows, passing out over a high bridge under which the thin clouds boil.

Mortarion, as ever, is at their head. He leads them higher up, and even through his mask Vorx can taste the poisons here. Some of those in the army succumb as they climb and are left where they fall. This is not callous disregard – to hesitate is dangerous, and there will be little to do for them – but it does begin to affect the rest of them. They begin to see the climb as a test of strength, a way to winnow out those whose destiny does not lead them into battle, and it is a lesson that sticks.

After many hours they climb into a meadow perched high up on the northern flanks of a black-rocked cliff edge. On another world it might have been frosted with flowers, but on Barbarus the grass is grey and the soil is packed like iron. There, they discover the ones they have been hunting – gaggles of the Pale, hairless, naked, stick-thin, huddling blindly in the bilious airs with their milky eyes and pearl-white skin. They were human once, the Pale. They were living, and their blood was hot, but now their breath is dry and sour. Such things, such horrors, are created from time to time by the greater monsters that dwell in the fog, the Kings and their ilk. Who knows why they do it? A casual cruelty, perhaps. Or maybe boredom, or some morbid, alien compulsion.

Mortarion does not cry out when he sees them. He issues no orders and does not break into a run. This is the way of battle here – they advance in silence, their plans already rehearsed, their boots crushing the sedge and their blades glinting dully in the mist. The Pale make no sound either, for they are already dead and their throats are as dry as grave dust.

The fighting is an eerie experience, a press of low grunts and hard cracks, with the scythes rising and falling amid a cold, bloodless scrum. Vorx works as hard as he has ever done. He swings his blade two-handed, remembering the lessons Flaunn taught him. He kills his first Pale warrior with a deft twist of the sickle edge, ripping out its throat before it can get its white claws close to his own. It still scrapes back at him with its grotesquely long nails, but cannot penetrate his armour.

Vorx feels a sharp thrill as he slices the creature’s severed neck clean in two, a movement that makes a soft sound like parchment ripping. All those around him are edging forwards, driving the Pale back through the hissing grass, never ceding won ground, grimly eating up the terrain.

Vorx looks up briefly to see Mortarion, at the forefront as always, laying about him with his blade, hurling the scrawny Pale aside with every mighty blow. He sees him standing taller by an arm’s length than the greatest of them, indomitable and unbreakable. The mountain peaks rear up on all sides, but none of them looks as solid as he does.

Vorx does not yet know what manner of being Mortarion is. He will not discover it for many years. It does not matter. In that one glimpse he sees all that he needs to know – that the Deathlord is one of them. He has been poisoned by this world, bled by it, and still stands tall. Alone of all of them, he could rise higher into the thick acid clouds of the uttermost heights, but he remains down here, gradually giving them the means to go with him, one day. This is a choice for him, one he did not have to make. The people of the valleys had no choices, had forgotten how to even consider an alternative, but under him they are learning again.

Vorx knows then that he will follow Mortarion unto death itself. He will fight for this master wherever and whenever he is commanded to, and this shall be his only and lasting purpose. He suddenly feels as proud as he did when the Pale King was ended, only now with greater cause.

There is still much work to be done. He knows, for he has been told many times, that this labour will never end, and that one should never seek more than that, and that Barbarus is a world only for the diligent and the enduring.

So he works the scythe hard, and with every stroke, with every final death he causes, his arms grow a little stronger.

Another world, gripped by a fire that will not die for ten thousand years.

Its skies were once blue and clear, but are now a blend of greys and blacks, shot through with the sullen glow of forbidden weapons. The air is painfully thin, almost as toxic as the heights of Barbarus were, though here that comes from the chem-agents released by deliberate hands.

There have been many battlefields, but this is, and always will be, the greatest of them. No clash of arms before or since will ever compare to it, for here is the fulcrum upon which the destiny of a species is decided. All assembled know this, and so they fight with a singular fervour that will never be repeated.

Vorx looks up briefly, seeing vertiginous walls that look so much like the old mountainsides. Every inch of them is contested now, and sheets of flame dance like spectres over the dark surfaces, reflecting across adamantium polished sheer by scouring agents.

The walls will be broken soon, just as they were on Oura’Nuoama a long time ago, and after that the slaughter will intensify further. Their long journey through time and space will find its conclusion, and the dark wager struck within the void will have its wisdom either confirmed or rejected.

Vorx feels no fatigue. His body has changed already, thickening and extending. He can sense the Gifts being born within him, and he knows that if he lives to see the end of this, he will be profoundly altered in even greater ways than those that have gone before.

Soon he will join his reaper’s blade to those of his brothers who contest the great gates. But for now he is hunting, running down a scent that he has been pursuing ever since making planetfall. There is a thread in his soul, a bitter thread, one that has been snagged for too long. He strides towards the high breaches, a landscape of murder flashing around him as proscribed destructiveness detonates across every horizon.

This is an indulgence, one that he could feel some guilt for, but there are other voices to heed now, ones that seem to encourage this kind of thing. He knows that it is the god’s will, for how else could he find him, this one insignificant soul amid the teeming multitudes who have come to the Throneworld to fight?

They meet under the shadow of a fallen archway barring passage further up, and the ground at their feet is clogged with corpses and wreckage.

Camanio seems to have been expecting this – perhaps he shares something of his beloved master’s foresight. The Blood Angel looks much as he did all those years ago – the bodies of his Legion have not been bloated and augmented by Gifts, and thus they guard the halls of their despot in a state of unforgivable weakness.

They could have had all these things, had they chosen to. They could have taken the more imaginative path.

The Blood Angel lowers his sword, point first. ‘You were filth back then, too,’ he says. ‘We all knew it.’

Vorx smiles. There are no words of counter-challenge – there never are – and so they fall into combat easily, slipping down through practised modes and attitudes without a thought. They are both so very good at what they do.

But Camanio is weary. He must have been fighting without respite for weeks already, maybe longer, and even his immaculate conditioning has its limits. Vorx realises that this will be over quickly, and it is a strangely bitter thing to acknowledge.

‘If I’d known then,’ Camanio gasps, working hard, ‘I’d have slit your throat right there.’

If I’d known then. So true. That goes for them all.

Vorx acknowledges, slowly, that he is not fighting at the very peak of his powers. He watches his opponent closely – the red-and-gold armour dented and blackened – and sees how far the old finery has been ruined by this conflict. He knows what such destruction will do to the proud souls who wear the plate, and can take no pleasure in it. Suddenly, an ancient insult, uttered without thought to eternity, seems a trivial thing.

But then, far away, he glimpses the familiar blush of green. On the edge of his superlative hearing, he catches the dull drone of flies. Just as on Oura’Nuoama, just as happened in that half-forgotten time when symmetries were still seen as coincidences, the primarch is making his move. As always, Mortarion leads from the front, making his progress in stately measures. Though out of the range of his physical sight, Vorx can nevertheless picture him clearly, his great cloak swirling, his bronze armour finer than anything forged on hateful Barbarus, his gaunt frame just as dominating as it always was. Even the primarch has taken on Gifts now, and they are beyond magnificent.

‘Skin and bones,’ Vorx spits, thrusting the scythe into Camanio’s chest, breaking through the fine armour and carving into the ribs beyond.

The Blood Angel arcs, impaled on the curve of steel, his arms twitching helplessly. Somewhere close by, Mortarion is marching into the annals of history, slaying with that deliberate control unmatched by any living soul in creation.

Vorx gets closer, wanting his stench to be the last thing Camanio senses.

‘Skin and bones.’

A twist, a wrench, and the deed is done. The archway is cleared. The path beyond is open.

‘But he made me strong enough.’

Then, never hurrying, never slowing, he crosses the threshold.

About the Author

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the novel Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Lords of Silence, Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne, Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain, Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion, the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and many more. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Warhammer Chronicles novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works in Bradford-on-Avon, in south-west England.

An extract from The Lords of Silence.

‘One, two, three.’

He moves, slowly. His claw reaches out, pushing through debris. Lights flicker – sulphur-yellow, intermittent like a failing heartbeat.

‘Four, five.’

He does not want to count. His lips move, unbidden, rehearsing well-trodden paths, stabilising his nervous system. Numbers have power – the subtle know this – but still he does not want to do it.

‘Six.’

He pushes himself free of the piles of metal, the heaps of flesh and iron. His boots, cloven like devil hooves, find purchase and push back. He drags himself out of the ruins, his breath wheezing through a rusted vox-grille.

‘Seven.’

That is the perfect number, the one that signifies the accomplishment and the end, but also the conception and then the process. It gives him strength, though he does not wish it to. It has always given him strength, even before the long change, and he dimly remembers this. Now, it is just a habit. So many things are just habits now.

He gets back to his feet. Detritus sheds from his back, clattering on the deck. Warning klaxons are sounding from somewhere, muffled and broken. A length of cable as thick as a torso hangs from the roof, glittering with a weak mantle of sparks. The grav field is off-kilter. He feels lighter than he should. His old plate should be heavy. It is crusted with the patina of age, thickened and fleshed, scabbed with boils and laced with glistening strings of pulled marrow.

He staggers over to a servitor station and sees the wretched operator fused to the deck, its fingers locked into a cat’s cradle of sensor plugs. It’s dead now, the last strobes of its cortex blown out, which is probably for the best.

He presses fat fingers to the command console, summoning status runes across greasy picter crystals.

He sees that the ship lives. He sees that Solace’s enemy is no longer in view. He wonders how much he aided the starship, or if this is just one more sign that things are running away from him.

‘Dragan,’ he voxes, and gets nothing but static back over the link.

Others are beginning to stir now. He sees one of his kindred emerge from under a sagging beam, helm lenses glowing vivid green in the dark. He sees a servitor twitch back into life, its bulbous stomach spilling across a disc-shaped tactical column. He sees a Little Lord plop down from a fizzing cluster of cabling. It shrieks as it splats on the deck, and he gathers it up carefully. It coos at him, and then nuzzles into the crutch of his elbow, snickering needle-teeth.

He is beginning to remember now. He is beginning to piece things together again. Is he slower now than he once was?

The Little Lord starts to lick the blood from his cracked ceramite.

Of course he’s slower. Everything is slowing down, congested, like running through water. That’s the Gift, of course. That’s one of the great objectives.

Vorx turns on his heel, patting the Little Lord absently.

‘Lumens, if you please,’ he grunts. ‘Get us moving.’

The bridge responds. Crew stagger out of the dark, pull themselves up from behind half-melted cogitator stations, wipe sweat and mucus from their eyes.

Around them, Solace starts to come to life. It’s hard to kill a ship like this. It’s hard to kill any of them.

‘One,’ he mutters, starting again.

Dragan gets to his knees, snarling. A gun-crew slave staggers over to him, perhaps trying to help him. This is a conceit, and he shoves the emaciated human into the wall, hears the faint snap of something osseous breaking. Then he’s turning, drawing himself up to his full height. The gun cavern yawns away from him, its roof lost in dark clouds, draped with rotting cables like spider threads.

Something big has detonated, hard enough to fry Solace’s grav-generators and throw the virtual axis off-kilter. The ship’s a big, bulky beast, so the damage must have been catastrophic, and close.

He slaps the side of his helm, then again, hard enough to knock some sense back into his incoming visual field. His mood is dark, and he wonders if the explosion was somehow his failure – if so, that’ll be more fodder for Vorx.

The gun gangs are coming back to life. Several dozen lie in the murk of the deck, limbs severed or ribcages smashed. A chain-mounted lumen swings lazily over them like a censer. The nearest gun barrel – a two-hundred-metre-long iron howitzer – rears up through the miasma towards its gunwale sheath. Recoil columns splay out, lodged deep into the substructure. Much of the breech is still made of black metal, a metre thick at its thinnest point, crushingly heavy. Only the edges show creeping evidence of the biological – strands of hair-thin follicles worming away, glacially slowly. They’ll get there in the end, consuming the inorganic and replacing it with the tougher stuff of sinew and cord.

Six metres away, Gunnery Captain Kodad regains his feet. He’s one of the more senior of the Unchanged, and something like a uniform still clings to his hefty frame. His skin is white-grey and boils cluster at his neckline, but he might even pass for human-normal in some of the grimier Imperial hives.

Dragan looks into his smeary adjuster-lens, then down the long rows of howitzers.

‘What’s the damage?’ he growls.

‘Significant,’ Kodad whispers. He always whispers now – some wasting Gift in his vocal cords, most likely. ‘It will take time.’

Dragan grunts. He can smell promethium, mingled with heavier aromas. Solace is bleeding somewhere.

‘Did you get a salvo off?’ he asks.

Kodad looks at him. His black-in-black eyes are unblinking. ‘Six, lord.’

‘Six.’

‘Rather proud of the crews, lord.’

Dragan grunts again. ‘Not good enough, though, was it?’ he snarls, and stalks out towards the exit aperture. His boots suck at the soft fleshy stuff on the deck – the permanent soup of swill that bubbles and ferments in every crevice. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. Any guns still out of action, I’ll flay the loader teams. Get it done.’

Vorx heads down from the bridge. As he goes, more lumens flicker back on. A grinding hum breaks out erratically from under the blackened deck-plates. Servitors – the name they still give to the panoply of brainstem-clipped monsters who man the low-level functions of the battleship – scuttle and lurch back into life. Some are almost human shaped, with two legs and two arms, and the head they were born with. Most are not. Some are like insects, while others have been almost entirely swallowed into the embrace of the corridor walls, their dried skin fusing with nutrient lines and power cables, until all that remains is a half-glimpsed face. Those faces gape stupidly as Vorx passes, some vestigial recognition response making their jaws twitch.

There was a time, Vorx thinks idly, that life and death were clearly delineated things. The human body would persist for a while, discrete from its fellows, before expiring and returning to the mulch. Now, though, every possible shade between the states of living and dying has been exploited. Half of his crew are, to all intents and purposes, semi-dead, or maybe semi-alive, their required service sustained by amalgams of ancient biotech and even older necromancy.

He glances at one of the buried servitor faces. It has no eyes, no nose, just an open mouth crammed full of electric strobe lines. Its lower lip spasms. Vorx wonders if it can detect his presence. He reaches out and gently presses a withered cheek.

Then he’s moving again. There’s no use pondering these things too deeply. It’s all part of the great panoply, the more-than-infinite variety that he serves and seeks to propagate. In another reality, he might have had the leisure to study these creatures, to see just how far the boundaries of decay and resilience can be taken before the parameters snap, but that is not, of course, his calling.

He works his way down a long spiral stair, wheezing as he goes. His lungs are half full of fluid, and he cannot help but think it a poor Gift. Then again, he has thought other Gifts were poor in the past, only to discover their genius much later.

‘Forgive,’ he says, speaking softly to the Little Lord at his elbow.

The tiny daemon giggles, then farts liquidly into the crook of his armour. That counts as forgiveness, probably.

He reaches his destination. He is a long way down now, buried within the folded heart of Solace’s central chamber-core. It smells rich here, like old soil. He sees pale worms wriggling through the mouldering metalwork, each barely longer than his fingernail. They glow. They have many eyes. And long teeth. Why does a worm need teeth?

He’s doing it again. Too curious – that’s always been his problem.

A door stands before him. It is made of wood. The beams are rotten and pocked with a sieve of beetle holes, and it all smells deeply of another world. Corroding iron bars and hinges creak as the door opens, letting a curtain of deep-green miasma roll across the threshold. He steps inside and enters a dank chamber of mists and mellow putrescence.

Tables, all of them hewn from thick beams of the same rotten wood, groan under the weight of age-spotted books. Candles flicker in their holders, struggling to stay alight against the humidity. Many pairs of tiny eyes blink from the shadows, red and vicious. Clocks tick, archaic mechanisms grind, and a hooked wheel turns slowly against the domed ceiling.

‘Were you damaged?’ Vorx asks.

A figure swivels in the murk, its face partly hidden by a thick cowl. Under those shadows pulses the evidence of many Gifts – boils, buboes, raised veins that throb with black fluid.

‘No, not much,’ the Tallyman Philemon replies, greeting Vorx with a nod. ‘Too far down, here. But you took a beating up there, yes?’

Vorx smiles wryly. ‘We are still alive. Or what passes for it.’ He looks around. He breathes in the rich air, and sees the many Little Lords squatting on high shelves. They grin back at him, chittering and belching. ‘This one took a fall. Perhaps you will look.’

He hands his charge to the Tallyman, who lifts the doughy bag of flesh up to the flickering light and turns it over in his gauntlets.

‘So I see,’ Philemon murmurs to the Little Lord. ‘Perhaps stay here a while. You can assist me.’

He reaches into a bag and pulls out something meaty with an eyelash still attached, before feeding it to the diminutive monster. It gurgles delightedly and hops up to the shelf with the rest of them, where a chattering tussle breaks out.

‘Solace must be wounded,’ Philemon observes, reaching for a taper to light more candles. ‘I feel it even in these bowels.’

‘It will recover,’ Vorx says.

‘What happened?’

‘I do not know.’ Vorx leans against a heavy pile of books – grimoires and ledgers, some open to reveal webs of inked diagrams and tables. ‘I thought we had a contest. They landed a few – raiding parties – but we matched them in the void.’ He shook his head. ‘The truth will emerge.’

Philemon reaches up to scratch his chin. Something pops, and his fingers glisten. ‘Where does it leave us?’

‘A long way from where we need to be.’

Philemon pauses, and the abacus at his belt clinks. ‘Dangerous.’

‘No more so than normal,’ says Vorx. ‘Run the numbers, will you?’

‘If you want.’

‘I need to trust a little more.’

Philemon gives him a severe look. ‘You do, siegemaster. You trust.’

‘All I have left, I think sometimes.’

‘It’s all beginning. I told you that. When the scales tip. You could be happier about it.’

Vorx chews at his lip. He can taste blood in his mouth, a thick soup made tangy by acid and gut-rot. ‘Which way do they tip, though, eh?’ he ruminates, running a finger down the spine of the nearest book. ‘We could be sliding down the wrong path. We have done it before.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Lords of Silence in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Johan Grenier.

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