Architect of fate, p.37
Architect of Fate, page 37
‘You caused this,’ Cyrus growled. ‘You summoned your kin to this world and killed it.’
‘Perhaps I caused its extinction. In a broad sense that might be true.’ The figure paused. ‘But I did not summon my kin here. Not intentionally at least.’ It turned its hooded head, the shadowed face twisting further than a neck should allow. ‘See.’
Cyrus turned, realising that it had never occurred to him to look behind them.
It was not a tower they sat on; it was a landing platform. Behind them, the hulls of lighters and heavy lifters baked in the sun. People were already rushing amongst them attaching fuel hoses; the whine of engines was rising to a shriek.
Fights were breaking out amongst those trying to get away. Cyrus saw a man in the robes of a prefect shot in the face when he tried to stop the ramp of a lifter closing. Others were simply battered aside by those that were stronger than them. The man and woman moved amongst the confusion, seemingly unseen by others. Cyrus watched as they ducked into the hold space of a lighter. A moment later it rose into the sky, heading for one of the few ships clustered around the planet. Others followed, the noise of their engines lost amongst the screams of the settlement and the first howls of the daemons.
‘You fled?’ Cyrus looked at the figure beside him.
‘Yes, Space Marine. I fled.’
‘Why?’
‘Because my kin did not come to this pitiful place for the clutch of worthless souls that breathed its air.’ The figure turned its hooded head back to the settlement. Blood was already flowing through its streets. ‘They came for me.’
‘For you?’
‘Yes, for me. I have many enemies amongst my kind. Some are my enemies because I laid them low or humiliated them. And then of course there is jealousy: jealousy of the power I had, jealousy of my favour in the eternal court of change.’ The figure shrugged. ‘We are daemons, fragments of the will of greater beings made of lies and hate. Our grudges are never simple, merely eternal.’ Cyrus saw the implication of what the thing was saying.
‘You were hiding.’
‘Well done, friend,’ said the figure in Colophon’s voice.
‘Why?’ said Cyrus. The world around him faded, its dying screams becoming distant murmurs of horror.
‘That question again,’ came the daemon’s voice from the fading world.
Cyrus could see nothing, He was falling again.
‘Because I am blind, Space Marine,’ said the daemon, its voice becoming faint and distant. Cyrus felt something like feathers brush his skin in the blackness. ‘Because I am blind.’
Cyrus opened his eyes and saw the world of his birth. The daemon stood next to him as he watched the Black Ships come to the skies of his childhood. Its yellow robe fluttered in the wind, the cowl hanging down its hunched back. Its hands clutched the fabric around its tall form, the gesture reminding Cyrus of Colophon pulling his green robes closer around him. It had two heads on long, feathered necks. Each was like the skinless skull of a vulture. Azure blue eyes, without iris or pupil, stared at him from each head.
‘The past,’ said one head in a voice that sounded like Hekate’s. The other was looking up at the dark silhouettes of the spacecraft drifting in low orbit. ‘Your past, Space Marine. The world that made you before it burned. I can see this because this is the past. These are dead and unchanging moments in the flow of time.’
The daemon shivered and the world changed, moving through images like cards dealt from a pack.
Here the command chamber of the Aethon, Cyrus watching the shape of an astropath turning in cold green light.
Here warships danced amongst lines of fire and spinning debris, their engines roaring as they turned before the ramming prows of spear-shaped warships. They turned too slowly and died, debris dribbling out of their broken hulls.
‘The past,’ came the daemon’s voice as Cyrus blinked from one moment to another. ‘All this is past. I am a weaver of fate, an oracle who sees all the paths of the future. That is my power, my advantage over my rivals and the thing that once kept me out of their jealous reach.’
Here Phobos, his sword held above him, the death lament on his lips.
‘But now I am blind, the future is lost to me. I cannot see past the present. This dead past is all that I can see.’
And here Space Marines in blue armour moved through rooms covered in rust brown dust. They have rearing dragons on their shoulder plates.
But I have seen this, he thinks as he watches. I have seen this and it is not the past. It is the future.
The daemon continued, ignorant to Cyrus’s realisation.
‘While I am blind I cannot stand against my kin and so they hunt me across your worlds.’
Cyrus saw something move under the soft layer of dust, like a wave pushed across the surface of water by a shark. A shape is rising from the dust. He shouts but the blue armoured Space Marines do not hear. The shape becomes a figure. It rises from the floor slowly, features forming on its powdered surface. It is reaches towards the Space Marines. Cyrus can sense the death hunger of the figure. He shouts again and the mouth of the dust figure moves.
You die now, he says with a voice like sand blown on a dry wind. The Space Marines turn to look at him. He is reaching for them.
He looks at his hands.
They are made of dust.
His vision blinked out and Cyrus was falling through swirling starlight and rushing sensation.
They had returned to the astropathic chamber. Colophon and Hekate stood in front of him.
‘You, Cyrus Aurelius,’ said Hekate as Colophon nodded. ‘I cannot see past you. You are a block in my sight, the point I cannot see past. I never saw you coming here and I cannot see your future now, only your past.’
Cyrus tried to move his limbs but found that they were still locked in place.
‘I let you live until now,’ Hekate continued. ‘You had a purpose in keeping my kin at bay. You might even have won here. But now the Inquisition come and the daemons that hunt me are at my heels, and so I must run and hide again.’ She stepped back ‘So you must die.’
Hekate turned to walk away, but Colophon paused and smiled up at Cyrus.
‘Thank you for the ship that you have so helpfully ordered to run before the Inquisition’s fury. It was most kind of you.’ He patted Cyrus’s unmoving armour and limped after Hekate.
On the highest tier of the chamber silent figures in green robes stepped from the shadows. Warp light shone in their blind eyes. There were eighty-one of them: the survivors of the attack on the astropaths. But he understood then that they had not survived. Those that had resisted had died, those who survived had become bound to Fateweaver. Cyrus could hear a low chattering like the cries of birds and the swish of feathers. Frost was forming under their feet with every step they took down the stone tiers.
‘There is one thing you should know before the end, my friend,’ called Colophon from the doorway.
‘I sent no message,’ said Hekate, and both figures vanished from sight.
The astropaths closed on him. Skin flayed from their new forms as the power of the warp reshaped them. Claws extended from hands and feet. Bones snapped and reset in twisted positions. Fur and feathers spread across stretched flesh. Cyrus was at the centre of a circle of snarling creatures.
Cyrus felt the force holding him weaken. Straining with all his will he felt his fingers move on the grip of his sword. His limbs trembled with effort, sweat coating him as he felt muscles shift. Threat runes swarmed his sight.
I have failed, he thinks. This is no longer the future, it is the present. I have failed and here I fall.
III
BOUND
The strike cruisers were the first to fire. Linear accelerators mounted along their spines spoke with one voice. Explosions blossomed off the station’s void shields, splashing against domes of energy that shimmered as they collapsed. On the strike cruisers’ flank the spear shape of the light cruiser turned on its axis, presenting a flank of macro batteries to the station. Bolts of plasma and explosive shells the size of battle tanks streaked across the void.
On board the smaller destroyers officers waited until the station’s shield envelope was on the edge of failing. As the blasts rippled over the last layers of shielding they launched torpedoes. Each carried a melta warhead. They were not intended to destroy but to cripple and burn. For the final killing blow they had other more exotic weapons to unleash.
The Sixth Hammer remained silent, like a king of old watching his young knights take the first blood. From his brass throne Inquisitor Lord Xerxes watched as the perfectly timed torpedo volley struck the station at the instant the last void shield collapsed. He nodded in brief satisfaction and raised his sceptre, its golden length worked with High Gothic script, its tip a leering daemon face of jade. He had killed many worlds and he preferred the final blows to fall at the simplest of commands.
‘Fire,’ he said, and The Sixth Hammer shook at his word.
Claws raked across Cyrus’s armour. Wild psychic energy lashed at him, slithering from clawed hands searching for weaknesses in his armour. Distorted faces filled his vision biting at him with pointed ivory teeth. He could hear them laughing and babbling in death-dry voices. His arm moved, lifting his storm bolter, dragging upwards as if pulling against tangling webs. Something sharp and serrated found a weak join in his armour. He began to bleed.
The deck quaked under his feet, trembling as if in time with distant thunder. The Inquisition had begun its bombardment.
Anger rolled through him, anger at his own stupidity. He knew he must fail: he had seen it. These were not new moments, they were past memories of visions being lived for the first time. A thing with a withered face was eye to eye with him, its clawed fingers cradling his helmet, razor tips alive with warp light as they reached for his eye pieces.
I will not fall to this fate! He bellowed the thought and the fallen astropaths fell back from him. He seized the anger that boiled through his mind and ripped free of the force that held him. Power flowed from him, radiating outwards as lightning spilled from his sword’s edge. His storm bolter spat, pumping explosive rounds through the twisted figures.
The sword was hot in his hand, the fury at its core bright with his rage. He cut into bodies with the death lament on his lips.
The station was dying. Rihat knew it. Blood red emergency light suffused the trembling docking corridor, and he could hear the low hiss of atmosphere bleeding into the void through cracks. The doors of the Aethon’s docking bay remained open as the dwindling stream of people swarmed through them. They had got as many as they could, but there were many more that they had left: hundreds trapped in parts of the station that could not be reached, pockets of Guardsmen surrounded and dying to the creatures that swarmed into the station even as it was torn apart. He had spoken to many of them over the vox, listening to their curses and cries over the spilling static. If he survived he knew he would hear those voices again for years to come, ghost voices cursing him from his dreams.
‘We must close the dock, colonel,’ called one of the last two White Consuls from just beyond the toothed blast doors. ‘The station is coming under sustained bombardment. It will begin to break apart soon. If we are to outrun its death we must break dock.’
Rihat shook his head. ‘Not yet. There are more who may reach us. Your Librarian ordered me to save all I could. I will honour that order.’
The Space Marine paused for a moment then gave a curt nod.
Rihat looked back to the people passing him. Grey-robed menials hurried beside purple-mantled prefects. Bloodied and pale-faced Guardsmen, some still cradling their weapons, jostled beside tech-adepts and slab-muscled ratings.
‘Colonel, we must break dock now.’ The harsh voice made his head snap around. Hurrying towards him were Hekate and Colophon, the bent-backed astropath wheezing as he kept up with the psyker’s long strides. ‘The bombardment will claim the station in moments; you must give the order now.’
Rihat looked from Hekate to Colophon. The old man looked pale, almost shivering with fear.
‘What of Cyrus? He went to find you?’
The old man shook his head. ‘I have not seen him,’ he said.
‘Colonel–’ began Hekate, but he cut her off.
‘We will go at the last possible moment, mistress.’ He gestured at the few people that hurried towards the dock, but kept his eyes locked with the psyker’s stare ‘The last possible moment.’ Hekate glanced at the two Space Marines bracketing the open blast doors, and people still passing through. ‘I suggest you get on board. There is not much time.’
The psyker curled her lip but walked away towards the Aethon, Colophon limping in her wake.
They came for him again, a tide of teeth, and claws. His storm bolter was silent and empty, discarded on the corpse-strewn floor. Lightning arced from his hand, leaping from body to body. Many fell but the rest still came forwards, scrambling over the dead with vulture cries. They reached him, claws scoring through armour, opening its polished innards to shine in the light of their dead eyes. Cyrus could feel strength leaching from him through a dozen wounds. With a grunt of effort he raised his sword above his head, both hands wrapped around the worn grip. A withered creature hissed at him as it lunged forwards. His first cut split it in two. The second cut scythed through another’s stomach and spine.
Something struck him from behind, his shoulder armour splitting as pain stabbed through him. His knee buckled to the ground. He could taste his own blood. Around him he could feel the creatures that had been astropaths laugh at him through the warp.
He could feel the worn joints of the armour gauntlet against his fingers, and the dull pressure of his fingers still gripping his sword. He had expended every weapon he had, used every skill he knew, and still he would fall to the fate he had foreseen. The creatures closed on him. He looked up, pulling himself to his feet. There was one thing, one terrible thing that he had not yet dared to do. It was a monstrous thing, a thing warned against and as difficult to survive as it was to control. Inside his helmet he smiled grimly to himself. With the last shred of his focused will he reached out and ripped a hole through reality.
The creatures fell back as Cyrus stood. The air around him was an accelerating cyclone of flickering power. He ripped the hole wider, his mind holding the vortex in front of him. It opened wider and wider, spinning with distorting shreds of reality. Twisted bodies vanished into the spinning hole, sucked through it with shrieks of anger and fear. For a second Cyrus held the vortex controlled, felt his mind try and grasp the thing he had birthed into being. He began moving a second before he lost control. The vortex broke from his grip with a shriek like shattering glass. Its black maw ripped wider, spinning everything it touched to nothingness.
Cyrus ran for the doors, feeling his wounded body fill with pain as he moved. Behind him the maw of the vortex grew with a hungering shriek.
The station burned. Red fire ate through armour plating, sucking the oxygen from its innards, twisting the bones of its structure until they cracked and distorted like the broken spine of a dying leviathan. Warp fire mingled with the blaze, daemonic faces rising and falling through the flames.
The circling ships of the execution fleet silenced their guns for an instant, pausing before the last blow fell. A narrow spread of torpedoes spat from the prow of The Sixth Hammer. Black darts running on bright trails, they carried the most esoteric and dangerous of payloads. As they struck the heart of the station the vortex mechanisms created a rippling chain of holes through reality. Black centred spirals opened in an overlapping cyclone that pulled the station into oblivion.
Cyrus ran through corridors filled with smoke and wreckage. His helmet display was pulsing with environmental warning icons that told him of sudden pressure changes, spiking toxicity and fatal oxygen levels. His torn armour was bleeding air from multiple rents. Some of the fibre bundles running through the armour had been severed. He could feel his muscles tearing as they hauled the armour’s dead weight through a limping run.
He turned a corner and saw the armoured doors of the dock still open, the docking bay of the Aethon beyond lit by strobing warning lights. There was a figure slumped over the dock controls, a last soul standing guard over the gates to safety.
Rihat was dying, his skin pale with oxygen debt, but his hand was still clamped over the door controls keeping the doors open to the very last moment. Cyrus paused. Behind him the long passage was beginning to twist and buckle.
‘Colonel,’ he said. The man did not move. ‘Rihat.’ His eyelids flickered and his blue lips mouthed something that Cyrus could not hear. Back down the passage a wide tear opened in the wall, spreading across ceiling and floor, sucking flames and air into the blackness beyond. Cyrus reached down to lift the colonel but the man had stopped moving, his eyes staring without seeing. Cyrus thought of saying something, whispering a last word to the man’s soul. He thought of the station that was being torn apart at that moment, as many dying within it as might have reached the Aethon, and could think of nothing that would give the dead comfort.
Cyrus moved the man’s hand from the dock controls. With a sound of hissing pistons the Aethon’s blast doors began to close. He walked alone between the closing teeth as the ship broke its bond with the station. Behind him the passage came apart with a shriek of rending metal.
The vortices swallowed the last of the station’s carcass. On their edge, the white hull of an Adeptus Astartes battle-barge turned, engines straining to claw against the forces pulling it back into the waiting mouths of the growing vortices.
On his throne Inquisitor Xerxes saw the ship slip from the imploding debris of the station and make for open space, noting the heraldry of the White Consuls. A noble Chapter indeed but one laid low in recent times. The loss of such a ship would be a blow to a brotherhood fading into history. But he could not permit any to outrun a decree of Exterminatus. He nodded to one of the bridge officers and watched as the destroyers and light cruiser accelerated into a looping course that would cut the ship off before it could reach the system’s edge.
