PERPETUAL    
Dan Abnett	 

	They had been living, against their will, in the city on the lip of the cliff for nearly two years.
	Two years that seemed like two centuries to Oll Persson – which was odd, because Oll Persson was used to the grand passage of time. He was one of the rare ones. One of the mythical beings. A vestigial side-branch of the human race that had been born with unique gifts.
	One of those gifts was functional immortality.
	Oll was old. He had lived multiple lifetimes, so many that he had forgotten most of them. He had no idea of his actual age any more. A man tended to lose precise count somewhere after his one hundred and fiftieth birthday. Oll’s best guess was that he was around forty-five thousand years old. Give or take.
	Two years was an interlude to one of the Perpetuals. A sunny afternoon. A long lunchtime.
	But not these two years. They had dragged out like a hard term, a relentless prison sentence.
	Frustration did that. Frustration and anxiety.
	They were lost. They were stuck. Their long, haphazard trek across the wrinkled folds of un-space had brought them to the city, and there the path had run out. 
	‘When are we, again?’ asked Zybes. All the members of their little band had become used to framing this odd question. Not where they were, but when.
	‘I think,’ Oll replied, ‘the tail end of M23.’
	He glanced at Zybes, and knew this answer would need expansion.
	‘Circa twenty-three thousand AD, by the old calendar. The last few centuries of the Dark Age of Technology.’
	‘Which is…?’ asked Zybes, pausing in the middle of his meal, a heel of bread hoisted to his mouth but forgotten.
	‘During the long rebellion of the Iron Men,’ said Katt. ‘The cataclysm that led to the… uh… Malthusian Catastrophe.’
	‘You remembered,’ said Oll.
	‘I listen,’ she replied, glancing at Zybes. ‘Not like him. I remember your words, even if I don’t really understand what they mean.’
	At the start of their journey, which had been less of an embarkation and more of a frantic flight from the atrocity at Calth, Oll’s policy had been to tell them very little. The members of his band – Zybes, Katt, Krank, Rane and the agricultural servitor Graft – were just survivors. They had not been chosen or called like him. Oll had brought them with him out of pity, because he had a way out of the slaughter, and it seemed cruel to prevent them from sharing it.
	Moreover, they were humans. Mortals, with the exception of the cyborg Graft. Oll had kept truths from them, because he’d been afraid of polluting their brief, limited lives with deep-scale information about the universe. That kind of knowledge might wound them on an existential level and drive them to insanity. How could any of them ever return to normal, mortal lives if he shared the immortal things that he knew with them?
	However, their escape from Calth had turned into a trek, and the trek had turned into six years.
	Six years of slicing reality open with a knife and slipping from one now to another. Six years of their questions. How do you open space with a knife? Where are we going? Who are you? Where are we now?
	When are we now?
	In the long run, it had become simpler just to answer them and explain things. They didn’t understand most of it, but they nodded sagely at his stories and explanations, grateful at least to be offered some answers.
	The girl Katt, brighter than most, remembered. She stored things up in that unusual brain of hers, and could recite back many of the truths that Oll had told them.
	Oll sometimes wondered why he had decided to answer their questions. To shut them up, was the simple explanation. But after a while, it had occurred to him that the more they knew, the better they could help him.
	One day, in an atomic bunker a kilometre beneath the pole of a dead colony world, he had told them the big picture.
	‘Life hangs in the balance,’ he had said.
	Krank frowned. ‘Whose life?’
	‘Mostly, everyone’s. What happened on Calth, and what happened to us there – it was part of the End War. A war that could rip our species apart.’
	‘Whose side are we on?’ asked Bale Rane, the young soldier.
	‘The Emperor’s, of course!’ Graft had whirred.
	‘Well, yes, of course,’ Oll replied. As it happened, Oll Persson had little time or liking for the thing that men called the Emperor. But that was beside the point, a personal matter. If you didn’t stand with the Emperor, you stood with the others. The usurpers.
	And the usurpers were not creatures that any sane man would want to throw his lot in with.
	So, yes. They stood with the Emperor. 
	‘I’m old,’ Oll had said to them.
	‘We know!’ laughed Rane.
	‘I mean… I’m older than you can imagine. I wanted no part of this war. I just wanted a quiet life. But I got recruited. Roped in.’
	‘By who?’ Katt asked.
	‘A friend of mine. He needs me to go to Terra, so that’s where we’re going.’
	‘Terra!’ gasped the seasoned army veteran Dogent Krank, amazed. ‘In all my days, I never dreamed I’d end up there, on the Throneworld.’
	‘Right. And what do we do when we reach Terra?’ Zybes asked.
	Oll had thought about that. Even though he was being more free with his answers, there were still some that he didn’t want to give.
	‘Whatever we can,’ he muttered. ‘Okay?’
	The trek had been long, and arduous, and perilous, but at the city on the lip of the cliff, it had ground to a standstill. The ancient compass that Oll carried, the one that could read the winds of the empyrean, had stopped working. There was no way to know where to cut next, or what bearing to aim for. They were becalmed, marooned with no way forward.
	Sometimes the winds could die down, so at first Oll had presumed it was going to be a minor delay. But days became months, and months became two years. They had set up a home in the city, and spent their days wandering the back lanes and alleys hunting for a spot where the compass might start to twitch again.
	The city was a deep, meandering place of dark stone. The locals called it Andrioch. It was a human colony from the days of the first stellar exodus, and Oll fancied that it had once been magnificent. But there had been some sort of misadventure, probably due to the technology wars that marred this bleak era of humanity. The dark stone of the city was dark because it was stained, perhaps with soot or by radiation burns. The cliff that the city overhung plunged away into the centre of the world. If you peered down, you could see, through the clouds of vapour, the glow of the magmatic furnace that was the planet’s core, far below. 
	He thought Andrioch had likely been twice this size, once. Half of it looked to have been torn away by whatever created the cliff. There were weapons in the older days that could do it: weapons of immeasurable power, tech devices employed by both the Iron Men and the alliances that stood against their cybernetic revolt.
	Oll remembered the horror of entropic engines that ignited planets. Sun-snuffers that uncoiled like serpents the size of Saturn’s rings. Mechnivores ingesting data along with the cities that contained them and hurling continents into the heavens. Omniphage swarms stripping flesh from a billion bones in the blink of an eye. Those were the good old days, when war was something too colossal for a human mind to comprehend.
	Not like the End War. The Warmaster’s heresy was a smaller thing, scaled for human and post-human brains.
	But it was bigger in some ways. Yes, bigger than the god-like struggle of the cybernetic revolt. Bigger in scope, bigger in its implications. More horrible, because humanity could apprehend it and drive it.
	Although he did not say so, Oll Persson believed that a mechnivore had bitten Andrioch in two. A rogue unit, perhaps – though by that latter stage of the revolt, almost all machines were rogue, their abominable intelligence querulously hunting for friends but perceiving everything as enemies.
	The citizens of Andrioch were pale ghosts, like things that had lived in a cave, lacking colour or health or effective eyesight. Their skin was translucent. They did not interact with Oll and his band, but spent their days and nights in the rotting pits of their dwellings, wired into constant data-feeds sutured into their eyes and scalps, feeding off some illusion of normal life while they waited for the Mechaniclysm to end.
	For them, it never would. Their bodies would wither and die, and they would come to exist only as a virtual spectre, the memory of a city stored in a digital gestalt.
	Oll was determined not to join them. But the trek was dangerous, and he realised that there was another reason he had started answering the questions his band asked him.
	None of them were ever going to go back to normal lives. He’d been fooling himself. He could tell them anything he liked, because they were never going to rejoin the ordinary again. They would probably die on the path, sooner or later, and if they made it to Terra as Dogent Krank so fervently wished, they would die there anyway.
	Oll had been weak. On balance, it would have been a greater kindness to leave them on Calth to perish.
	That was typical of him. Ollanius Persson had always been too merciful for his own good. A bad trait in a soldier, especially a soldier charged with such a vital mission.
	He sighed, staring into their campfire. ‘Two years. We can’t linger here any longer.’
	He didn’t dare tell the others how worried he was, because then they’d realise there were some questions to which even Oll the Pious didn’t know the answer.
	There was no way forward. No route around. The only way out of Andrioch was to go back, to retrace their steps, and John Grammaticus had warned Oll never, ever to do that.
	Oll wandered the alleys where the city leaned over the cliff. He thought he could see the actual bite marks.
	He was pretty sure that the cliff itself was the problem. Andrioch was the next step in the trek, but they had arrived there too late. The mechnivore, or whatever other rogue behemoth had preyed on the place, had consumed more than just the physical city and the planetary crust beneath.
	It had eaten data.
	Not simply the digital data stored in Andrioch’s analytic engines, but the raw data of space-time itself. It had bitten away the vital set of empyreal coordinates that Oll needed, the cosmic vectors of the immaterium that his silver compass and little jet pendulum responded to. The hole they had spent two years living beside was more than a material hole. It was a wound in the ether, the anti-reality that coexisted with the physical universe.
	Andrioch perched on the edge of a bite mark in the warp.
	The question was: was this situation pure misfortune, or something deliberate?
	He believed the latter. There was no doubt in his mind that agents of the enemy were pursuing them. Indeed, he was sure that they had accumulated several enemies – daemons, Word Bearers seeker-legionaries, and the assassins of the Cabal.
	But this was not a simple, hostile threat. Someone had steered them, or influenced them. Someone had tricked them into taking the misstep to Andrioch, knowing that they could go no further.
	‘Oll!’
	He heard someone calling his name. He paid it little heed. His mind was old, and the memory of ancient voices haunted him from time to time.
	Then he realised it was a real voice.
	‘Oll! Oll!’
	There, on the black stones of the broken causeway ahead of him, right on the lip of the endless cliff, stood John Grammaticus. ‘Bit of a mess,’ he called out. ‘Sorry.’
	Oll clambered up to join him. ‘We’re stuck here, John. This is a dead end.’
	‘I know.’
	‘We’ve been here two years.’
	John looked aghast. ‘Two? I’m sorry. I’ve been caught up in things. Well, the Cabal caught up with me. Again. They’re putting me back to work for them. I’ve been waiting for a moment when their eyes aren’t on me so I could reach out to you. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.’
	‘So am I.’
	‘They’re onto you, too,’ John warned. He was wearing the dress uniform of a photon lancer from the Unification Wars. It was rather too ornamental for Oll’s taste, but John’s mind had chosen his form and appearance. He wasn’t really there. Oll didn’t have to reach out and touch the wet nothingness of a psionic projection to know that.
	John was an ultra-function psyker. This was a telepresent meeting.
	‘Onto us?’ asked Oll.
	‘Onto you. The others don’t matter. I’m not sure why you brought them along.’
	‘Company,’ said Oll. He knew that John Grammaticus would have little patience for the rationale because I didn’t want them to die.
	‘You’re so sentimental, Oll. You should ditch them. You can’t take them all the way to Terra anyway. Especially not the girl. She’s live.’
	‘Touched by the warp, I know.’
	‘And untrained, which is worse. Come on, you know the only reason you have to go to Terra instead of me is that you’re not psi-active. A psyker can’t get in undetected. It has to be you.’
	‘Okay, okay, let me worry about the girl,’ said Oll. ‘Explain about the Cabal, and how I came to be stuck here.’
	‘You’re not stuck. You’re hiding. I hid you here. They’ve worked out what you’re up to and they’ve sent hunters to stop you. That last cut you made…’
	‘From Ulbanuc to here?’
	‘Yes. I had to steer you. If you’d made the obvious cut, it would have led you through to early colonial Cadia, and the Cabal had a kill team waiting for you there.’
	Oll remembered Ulbanuc, the last stop before Andrioch. A plague cemetery world from the Age of Strife. The compass and pendulum had behaved oddly there. He’d been about to make a cut, but the needle had moved and he’d made a different cut instead. ‘That was you?’
	John nodded. ‘The best I could manage. I nudged the compass so it would bring you here. Cadia was a trap. I brought you here because there is only one way in or out. It’s clear now. Go back to Ulbanuc then cut through to Cadia. You’ll be on your way again.’
	‘You told me never to go back.’
	‘Well, the rules change, Oll. You have to, this time. This was a hideaway, somewhere they wouldn’t think to look for you.’
	‘Because of that?’ Oll asked, gesturing to the chasm that yawned beneath the causeway.
	‘Right, because of that. That giant hole of cosmic nothing. Brilliant, eh?’
	Oll shrugged. John began to lose his patience.
	‘Go back to Ulbanuc, Oll. I’m sorry about the delay here, I really am. Go back, then cut on to Cadia. You’re so close, now.’
	‘Are you sure?’
	‘I swear it, Oll. So close. Go back, cut again. You’ll be on your way.’
	Another voice echoed in the gloom. ‘Who is this you’re talking to, Oll?’
	Oll and John looked around. Katt was picking her way up the causeway towards them, frowning. Oll realised that he had been gone a while. She’d come looking for him.
	‘This is John,’ he began, then stopped. ‘You can see him?’
	‘Yes, silly!’
	‘Of course she can, Oll,’ said John with a nervous laugh. He tapped his temple with the tip of his index finger. ‘Psyker, remember? Of course she can see me.’
	He turned to face the girl.
	‘I was just telling Oll the good news,’ he said. ‘It’s time to get moving again.’
	Oll went very still. He watched as a handful of pebbles, just tiny flecks of stone, trickled off the causeway and plunged over the edge into the endless drop. They had been dislodged by John’s boots as he’d turned.
	But John Grammaticus was just a psi-projection.
	He wasn’t really there.
	Oll threw his fist into John’s gut. The blow landed solidly. John staggered back, and then came clawing at Oll.
	He was strong. Stronger than any human. Stronger than any Perpetual. His blow knocked Oll backwards. Sprawling, Oll landed at Katt’s feet, so dazed that he couldn’t clear his head.
	‘I’ll just have to do this here, then,’ said John in a voice that wasn’t John Grammaticus’.
	There was a bright flash. John was hit in the chest and knocked onto his back.
	A double-pulse from a laspistol. Katt stood with the weapon braced in her hands. She didn’t like guns, but she had learned how to use them.
	‘He isn’t your friend, is he?’ she asked.
	Oll didn’t answer. He lunged for John in desperation. Despite the las-bolts to his chest, He was picking himself up, so Oll buried the blade of his athame dagger in John’s neck. The man spasmed wildly, then fell, his feet twitching.
	Oll made sure he was dead. It wasn’t John. The corpse was too bulky. The falsehood cloak that had been woven around it was failing. Oll and Katt saw what was underneath.
	‘What is it?’ asked Katt. ‘Who was he?’
	‘An enemy, hunting for us. Trying to lure us into a trap.’
	‘He’s so big,’ the girl murmured, more afraid now. ‘What’s that tattoo on his collarbone there? Is it a spider?’
	‘No. A hydra.’
	‘What does that mean?’
	‘It means the Alpha Legion is hunting for us,’ Oll replied. But that, like most of his answers, meant nothing to her.
	Oll gathered his little band together in the rotting black stone house they had been sharing.
	‘Enemies are coming,’ he told them. ‘This place, it’s a snare. A dead-end. They managed to make us turn the wrong way. They’re trying to block us from Terra, which means we must be close.’ 
	‘What do we do, Trooper Persson?’ asked Graft.
	‘We have to change course. We have to follow the winds a different way for a while, until we can get back on the right bearing again.’
	Rane glanced out of a broken window. ‘But we can’t go back, if it’s a trap...’ he began.
	‘We can’t,’ Oll agreed. ‘The hunter had a knife like mine. Well, a little like mine. Cuts the same way. Basically, he was moving the way we move. That’s how he found us. He came from Ulbanuc on our heels, so that’s where they’re waiting for us.’
	Zybes shook his head. ‘But there is no other direction. You told us, this is a dead end. The only way out is back the way we came, and killers are waiting for us there.’
	Oll took a deep breath.
	‘There’s one other way,’ he replied. ‘It’s dangerous. It’s extreme, but I think it could work – if you trust me, and you’re prepared to risk it. It’s the only way, apart from living here for the rest of our lives. And our enemy won’t be expecting it. What do you say?’
	Krank nodded, trying to look brave. ‘We trust you.’
	‘How dangerous is it?’ asked Zybes.
	‘I won’t lie. Very.’ Oll took out his blade. ‘But this will get us through. Only special blades can cut through space. They’re rare. This is rarer still. The most special, special blade of all. Blessed and cursed, both at once. If anything can get us there, it’s this. It can cut more than space.’
	‘Why, what else can it cut?’ Rane asked.
	‘Gods.’
	They packed, and headed out after Oll. He guided them towards the place of departure. He was carrying the knife, but had put away the compass and pendulum for the time being. He wouldn’t need them for this. It wasn’t going to be a subtle crossing.
	‘Thank you,’ he said to Katt as they walked up through the city.
	‘For what?’ she asked.
	‘You saved us. I’m getting old. I nearly missed the trick that was being played on me. So, thank you. And thank you for reminding me why it was a good idea to bring you all along on this journey.’
	‘Why was it?’
	‘Because nobody could do this alone.’
	They reached the edge of the causeway. Below them, the cliff fell away into the hole that had been bitten through the world, and through time and space as well.
	‘What now, Trooper Persson?’ said Graft, halting at the precipice.
	Oll smiled. ‘We jump.’