War Without End Read online

  The daemon laughed silkily. It ran long, black arms around Horus’s neck in a loving embrace.

  Maloghurst looked from face to face around the gathering. Indifference, or hatred in places, greeted him. He retreated before it.

  He ran, the only gait his body would allow him was a ridiculous gallop. The whine of his power amour as it attempted to match and amplify this movement sounded like mocking laughter.

  He found himself in a corridor that he could not possibly reach from Lupercal’s Court. Screaming faces formed in metal that had become as fluid as boiling water. The corridor convulsed, warping out of shape entirely. Maloghurst’s crippled legs gave way under him and he fell. There was no floor to halt him. He plummeted into a hell of unnatural colours. A swirl of dark threads gathered into an oily scum atop the shifting ocean.

  From this, the daemon rose, sucking the blackness into itself. The oil was fed by a thousand dark veins threading the warp, and so reduced only slowly.

  By the time the daemon had absorbed all of the darkness, it was as big as a Battle Titan. By some trick it was suddenly below Maloghurst.

  Come to me, Maloghurst! Be mine… Let us be one…

  Maloghurst plummeted helplessly into its yawning maw.

  He sat bolt upright on his pallet, forgetting the ruin of his body for a moment. The motion sent a jag of pain up his nerves that emerged from his mouth as a harsh grunt. Sweat poured off his skin. His muscles and scars were picked out by curves of dim light issued by the door lock lumen. He looked at his arm, and saw it as the daemon’s oily limb. He recoiled, blinked, and then saw only his hand.

  Of the thousands of articles blindly collected as war trophies aboard the Vengeful Spirit, few had proven to be artefacts of the true faith. Among them were certain objects of power. Maloghurst reached for one of these now.

  Cold, greasy metal met his touch. His hand closed around it, and brought it to his face. A small gargoyle taken from a degenerate human world. The savage inhabitants had not possessed the technology to manufacture even this ugly thing of lead, and so its provenance was unknown. Whatever its true origins, he had found it to be an effective daemon ward. He slid back the hinged lids that covered the coloured glass of its eyes.

  They glowed a warning red.

  ‘Neverborn,’ hissed Maloghurst.

  A foul smell filled the room. He choked, saliva spilling from his wry lips.

  He gulped air flavoured by nothing more than recycling systems and warm metal.

  Rakshel’s lair was deep inside the ship, not far from the grand transit canyon that ran the length of the ship’s keel. These were thrall spaces, and many were long abandoned. Maloghurst passed empty dormitories, refectories full of spilled tin plates caked in decayed organic matter. Spaces where crew serfs no longer lived, their halls emptied by war. The mortal personnel manifest of the Vengeful Spirit ran into the tens of thousands. They swarmed the endless arterial corridors of its interior, as numerous as blood cells. And like blood cells they bled freely into the void whenever the flagship’s hull was breached.

  The whispers were stronger this far below the command deck. Things flickered in the corner of one’s eye. It was better to steer clear of the dark places, even for one as strong as Maloghurst.

  But today he had no choice.

  Strange smells wafted on ventilation draughts – sweet and feculent, too strong to be real and too real to be dismissed. Damage suffered in the Vengeful Spirit’s endless battles was evident all about him. Whole sections were sealed away, bulkhead doors welded shut. Deck plating was buckled. Wrinkled walls spilled congealed waves of sealant foam like lava from volcanic cracks. There were areas where the gravity or lighting was inconstant.

  Maloghurst came to a cavity hollowed from the side of the ship by a nova blast. Sheets of plain metal the size of fortress doors sealed the breach. A swaying catwalk hung from wires anchored to the mess of broken pipes and void-ice above. The tug of artificial gravity there was capricious, coming first from one direction, then another. Maloghurst grabbed the walkway’s guide rail for support and dragged himself across. The cavity glimmered with warning lights. Beneath his feet, huge servitors hauled off tons of tangled, fused debris. Arc-lightning from welding torches played, sparks showering down in yellow rains. Without a sojourn in drydock, damage like this could never be repaired, only contained. There were many such wounds along the Vengeful Spirit’s flanks.

  He left the ragged chamber, exiting through a door into a corridor that perversely bore little sign of damage. A repair crew passed him on the way to their worksite. They were armed, armoured and in great number. A triad of Mechanicum priests led them, red augmetic eyes winking under black cowls. The rearmost of their number led a Thallax unit by warding chains upon whose links glowed runes of containment. Corposant glittered in the machine’s exhaust. A growl grumbled from the smooth faceplate at Maloghurst as he went past. The thing’s organic components were not of mundane origins.

  With this Dark Mechanicum monster in their midst, still the repair team looked about warily. The armsmen that escorted them peered fearfully from behind their glass visors.

  Their fear was not for him. They watched the shadows.

  Among the broken decks and exhausted magazines dwelt the Davinites. Maloghurst smelled their reek a hundred metres before he came to their domain. A musty, animal scent carried on sighing breezes of the ship’s air. The odour of urine, cooking, smoke and faeces associated with any one of humanity’s rough camps pitched since the dawn of time.

  The Davinites cleaved to their roots, moving periodically about the ship. Their current abode was a store emptied of all supplies – one of many. Voided of their original contents by the demands of war, they drew in new occupants, rarely benign.

  The broad blast doors were open. Maloghurst went within. Davinites squatted around open fires burning directly on the deck. Their shelters were of cloth or scavenged steel plating. There had been cities on Davin of well-ordered adobe houses, but the Primordial Truth had come from the plains tribes, and Maloghurst found himself amongst a nomad band encamped in a metal cave.

  His enhanced eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom. There were thirty-one of them, the remainder of the group that had come aboard at Erebus’s invitation. With their patron banished, there were fewer than there had been, but those that remained appeared unchanged by the slow alteration of the Vengeful Spirit. They showed little sign of the deprivation exhibited by the menials, and they behaved as though the ship were altering itself to suit them.

  The Davinites ignored him. They gazed into their fires as silently as stone-age hunters of Old Earth abroad on a monster-haunted night. He made for the largest tent, expecting to find Rakshel inside. He was not disappointed.

  The ambassador was sleeping, a flat-dugged Davinite female nestled into him atop a pile of ragged bedding. The ambassador had always looked ill-kempt but in comparison to his abode, his appearances in Lupercal’s Court were princely.

  Maloghurst jabbed at the makeshift bed with his cane. Rakshel opened one eye then the other. In the dim light, his pupils were even larger than normal.

  ‘You came,’ he said.

  ‘You were expecting me?’ asked Maloghurst. He displayed no surprise. The last few years had inured him to surprises.

  ‘The least of us here could smell the warp-taint upon you. Yes, I expected you.’

  Rakshel sat. The woman awoke and smiled at Rakshel – he nodded to the legionary by the bed. Her drowsiness rapidly left her and she leapt up, wrapping herself in a filthy blanket as she ran.

  Maloghurst watched her go. ‘A fine home you have made yourself, here.’

  Rakshel shrugged, the gesture turned into an extravagant stretch and yawn. ‘I have known hardship and this is as comfortable a place as any. Conditions here are better than for many of your servants, Twisted One. The gods provide their bounty easily to us true followers
.’

  Maloghurst laughed. His respirator made it a bark. ‘A fine bounty.’

  Rakshel rested his hairy arms on his knees. ‘You are the one hounded by the Neverborn, not I. I am safe. You are not.’

  ‘I could deny it,’ said Maloghurst. ‘But you are right. I see it in my dreams. I hear its voice when I am awake. A daemon of oil and smoke.’

  ‘It is close then. Best make your peace with it – your torment in the next life might be less.’

  ‘That is not satisfactory.’

  ‘No?’ Rakshel was enjoying himself, and made no attempt to conceal it.

  ‘You tell me often of your mastery of the warp. Now is the time for your bragging to cease. I need deeds. You will rid me of the Neverborn.’

  Rakshel pursed his lips in thought. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You shall have deeds, though not mine.’

  Maloghurst leaned on his cane questioningly.

  ‘You will need someone mightier than myself. I will take you to Tsepha. He was an acolyte of Akshub, and is the greatest of us still alive.’

  Rakshel climbed from his bed, unashamed by his nakedness. He held up the flap of his tent and pointed to a fire set some way from the others.

  ‘You will find him there.’

  ‘You will not accompany me?’

  Rakshel gave Maloghurst a wide smile, shook his head, and let the tent flap drop between them.

  Maloghurst picked his way around piles of rubbish and crates repurposed as furniture. The rest of the Davinites ignored him, intent on whatever it was they saw in the dance of the flames.

  There was a lone figure by the furthest fire. A filthy, near-naked standard human boy. He was covered from head to foot in arcane marks carved into his flesh. His hair had come away in clumps.

  Blood-red eyes and a raspy voice gave away the boy’s true nature. ‘The Twisted One comes looking for help. I am honoured.’

  ‘Tsepha? Acolyte of Akshub?’

  ‘I am he,’ said the boy.

  ‘You are not Davinite.’

  ‘Davinite, Terran, Cthonian… What does that matter? All souls are the same in the eyes of the gods. I accepted their truth, and I am undying – I went away, now I return. Before I was Davinite, and now I am Cthonian. How do you like my vessel?’ He held up arms covered in sores. When he smiled, bloody gums showed.

  ‘You were brought back?’

  ‘If you wish to call it that.’ The possessed boy resumed, looking into the fire. He poked at it with a human thighbone. Blue flame licked around the bulb of the femoral head. Shapes moved under his skin, mimicking the play of the flames. ‘You think of your summonings. I am not the same as your Luperci. I am myself alone.’

  Around the other fires silent figures squatted. Maloghurst searched them. ‘Where is your mistress?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Bring her back. I want to speak with her.’

  ‘You cannot. She is no more. She was consumed. Erebus destroyed her. If you want help, you must ask it of me.’

  ‘I am haunted.’

  ‘The Neverborn attach themselves to those who show promise. You are talented, but untutored. Your master gives you more power than you can safely wield. By creating the Luperci you have opened yourself to risk. The being that dogs you senses a way in through your mind. It will happen, and it will destroy you.’

  ‘You will help me,’ said Maloghurst. It was not a question.

  The boy looked up sharply, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. ‘I will? And what will the great Maloghurst do for me? You are the servant of the chosen one, but even you do not get to make demands of Tsepha.’

  Maloghurst glowered down at the boy. ‘Your life will be forfeit if you do not.’

  The boy chuckled wetly. ‘And if it is, so what? Did you not hear my previous words, noble warrior? You cannot kill me.’

  Maloghurst’s gauntlet dug into his cane. His other hand hovered over his dagger.

  The boy glanced at it. ‘A holy knife. You have learned much, but not enough.’

  ‘You will help me,’ rasped Maloghurst, ‘or I will put your undying nature to the test.’

  ‘Then you will have no help, and I will not die. Such a sad way to end a life, so full of promise, with a failed experiment. A waste of everyone’s time.’

  ‘There is a price, then?’

  The boy discarded the thighbone and poked at the fire with his unprotected hand. Fatty smoke curled off blackening flesh. He showed only fascination, and no discomfort.

  ‘We will have what we have been asking for these last months. Access to the Warmaster.’

  ‘Why should you have it?’

  ‘Because you will die if we do not.’

  ‘I am expendable,’ said Maloghurst. ‘A pawn in the game. I need a more compelling reason than my own fate.’

  ‘Damnation, then. You know that is what awaits you. Is that compelling enough? You argue disingenuously. Why are you here if you do not care for your own fate?’

  ‘I did not say that I do not care. Answer me.’

  The boy got to his feet and tilted his bloody eyes upwards. Maloghurst had no knack for telling the ages of the unenhanced. Tsepha’s host was pre-adolescent, though probably not by much. Younger than the boys recruited into the Legion, perhaps? His head came as high as Maloghurst’s belt.

  ‘We are the people of the one true faith,’ said Tsepha. ‘It was we who opened the eyes of the Warmaster to the lies of the Emperor. How foolish you must feel, now that you also see. The lies were obvious, and the truth in plain sight. All around you was the evidence of his falsehood, and you ignored it, clinging to a creed every bit as dogmatic as those you denounced. How many times were you confronted by it? And now you are converts, with the zeal of those whose eyes are uncovered. But we are servants of the gods of old. We could teach you so much more.’

  ‘I have heard this offer before, not least from the serpent Erebus. You seek influence. You seek power through access to Horus Lupercal. That I cannot allow. This war is not being waged for the advantage of the cults of Davin.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘Then you will die and burn forever, and we will have it anyway.’

  Tsepha’s blackened hand blurred, and became pallid and unharmed again but for the weeping ritual cuts incised into the skin. Tsepha held it up and gave a bloody grin.

  Maloghurst remained silent. The muttering of Davinites was curiously peaceful in the dark. There, in that metal cave, it was easy for a moment to forget exactly where he was. The whispers were absent. The presence of the millions of tonnes of the Vengeful Spirit all around him receded.

  ‘What must I do?’ he said eventually.

  The boy smiled in quiet triumph. ‘Fulfil your promise. There is a ritual that can be performed. It will armour your soul against the Neverborn. Your own power will be increased. A fair bargain, I think.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. Or you will be lost. Today?’

  Maloghurst grunted. ‘So be it.’

  ‘Then at ship’s midnight. There is a place we can use.’

  The location entered into Maloghurst’s mind. An embarkation cavity, a docking point for supply lighters a few hundred metres from their current position.

  ‘I will be there.’

  ‘I know you will,’ said the boy.

  In a circle marked carefully in blood and bone dust, Maloghurst concluded his ritual. He bowed eight times before the holy octed large upon the wall. In his hand he held a bolt shell casing on a chain. It was stoppered with black wax, sealing his own blood inside. He muttered the words that Horus himself had passed to him. The shell emitted a strange radiation not native to the material realm – when he opened his eyes, he could no longer see it. His ruined face essayed as much of a smile as it was able.

  In the circle it was completely silent. Neither the noises of the s
hip or the whispers of the daemon-kin troubled him within its circuit. The faint tremor of the deck plates was the only reminder that he was aboard a starship at all.

  The opening of the door broke his concentration. The flames on the black candles wavered.

  ‘Aximand,’ he said. ‘Who let you in?’

  ‘I am of the Mournival, Mal. I can go where I wish. Where have you been? Lupercal wants to see you.’

  ‘I cannot. I have matters to attend to, as you can see.’

  Aximand’s eyebrows rose on his face unevenly. His features were lopsided, and somewhat grotesque under certain conditions. Once the living image of his gene-father, his mutilation should have destroyed the likeness. Somehow, it had made him look even more like Horus. He was a caricature of a demigod.

  Both of them were twisted now, in their own way.

  ‘You are refusing a summons from Horus? You are bold,’ Aximand said. ‘Or is there something else going on in that labyrinthine mind of yours?’

  Maloghurst rounded on him. ‘What makes you say that?’

  Aximand made a face of mild surprise. ‘Perhaps not. I hear you mumbling to the gods. You are becoming as unhinged as Lorgar’s Seventeenth.’

  ‘You have witnessed the power that is mine to command.’

  ‘I have. The Luperci are impressive, Mal. But to do so much…’ Aximand looked at the trappings of Maloghurst’s ritual with a complete lack of interest. ‘We are warriors, not priests.’

  ‘I am no priest, Little Horus. The Luperci are a weapon. This is another.’ He held up the bolt shell on its chain.

  Aximand frowned. ‘There is nothing there.’

  ‘There is. I cannot see it either, but I know that it is there. The power of the warp acts more effectively than any cloaking device. You too could wield such power, if you were not so narrow-minded.’

  ‘Narrow-minded I may be, Mal, but I’m not stupid enough to disobey a direct summons from Horus.’

  Maloghurst gripped his cane. ‘Tell him I will attend him later.’