[Chapbook 2009] - Shadow Knight & The Dark Path Read online

  Talos didn’t quite sigh. “Are you almost done?”

  “This hulk is as hollow as Uzas’s head, brother. Negative on anything of worth. Not even a servitor to steal. I’m returning to the boarding pod now. Unless you need help shooting the Angels’ children?”

  Talos killed the vox-link as he stalked through the black corridor. This was fruitless. Time to leave—empty-handed and still desperately short on supplies. This… this piracy offended him now, as it always did, and as it always had since they’d been cut off from the Legion decades ago. A plague upon the long-dead Warmaster and his failures which still echoed today. A curse upon the night the VIII Legion was shattered and scattered across the stars.

  Diminished. Reduced. Surviving as disparate warbands—broken echoes of the unity within loyalist Astartes Chapters.

  Sins of the father.

  This curious ambush by the Angels who had tracked them here was nothing more than a minor diversion. Talos was about to vox a general withdrawal after the last initiates were hunted down and slain, when his vox went live again.

  “Brother,” said Xarl. “I’ve found the Angels.”

  “As have Uzas and I. Kill them quickly and let’s get back to the Covenant.”

  “No, Talos.” Xarl’s voice was edged with anger. “Not initiates. The real Angels.”

  The Night Lords of First Claw, Tenth Company, came together like wolves in the wild. Stalking through the darkened chambers of the ship, the four Astartes met in the shadows, speaking over their vox-link, crouching with their weapons at the ready.

  In Talos’s hands, the relic blade Aurum caught what little light remained, glinting as he moved.

  “Five of them,” Xarl spoke low, his voice edged with his suppressed eager­ness. “We can take five. They stand bright and proud in a control chamber not far from our boarding pod.” He racked his bolter. “We can take five,” he repeated.

  “They’re just waiting?” Cyrion said. “They must be expecting an honest fight.”

  Uzas snorted at that.

  “This is your fault, you know,” Cyrion said with a chuckle, nodding at Talos. “You and that damn sword.”

  “It keeps things interesting,” Talos replied. “And I cherish every curse that their Chapter screams at me.”

  He stopped speaking, narrowing his eyes for a moment. Cyrion’s skulled helm blurred before him. As did Xarl’s. The sound of distant bolter fire echoed in his ears, not distorted by the faint crackle of helm-filtered noise. Not a true sound. Not a real memory. Something akin to both.

  “I… have a…” Talos blinked to clear his fading vision. Shadows of vast things darkened his sight, “…have a plan…”

  “Brother?” Cyrion asked.

  Talos shivered once, his servo-joints snarling at the shaking movement. Magnetically clasped to his thigh, his bolter didn’t fall to the decking, but the golden blade did. It clattered to the steel floor with a clang.

  “Talos?” Xarl asked.

  “No,” Uzas growled, “not now.”

  Talos’s head jerked once, as if his armour had sent an electrical pulse through his spine, and he crashed to the ground in a clash of war plate on metal.

  “The god-machines of Crythe…” he murmured. “They have killed the sun.”

  A moment later, he started screaming.

  The others had to cut Talos out of the squad’s internal vox-link. His screams drowned out all other speech.

  “We can take five of them,” Xarl said. “Three of us remain. We can take five Angels.”

  “Almost certainly,” Cyrion agreed. “And if they summon squads of their initiates?”

  “Then we slaughter five of them and their initiates’

  Uzas cut in. “We were slaying our way across the stars ten thousand years before they were even born.”

  “Yes, while that’s a wonderful parable, I don’t need rousing rhetoric,” Cyrion said. “I need a plan.”

  “We hunt,” Uzas and Xarl said at once.

  “We kill them,” Xarl added.

  “We feast on their gene-seed,” Uzas finished.

  “If this was an award ceremony for fervency and zeal, once again, you’d both be collapsing under the weight of medals. But you want to launch an assault on their position while we drag Talos with us? I think the scrap­ing of his armour over the floor will rather kill the element of stealth, brothers.”

  “Guard him, Cyrion,” Xarl said. “Uzas and I will take the Angels.”

  “Two against five.” Cyrion’s red eye lenses didn’t quite fix upon his brother’s. “Those are poor odds, Xarl.”

  “Then we will finally be rid of each other,” Xarl grunted. “Besides, we’ve had worse.”

  That was true, at least.

  “Ave Dominus Nox,” Cyrion said. “Hunt well and hunt fast.”

  “Ave Dominus Nox,” the other two replied.

  Cyrion listened for a while to his brother’s screams. It was difficult to make any sense from the stream of shouted words.

  This came as no surprise. Cyrion had heard Talos suffering in the grip of this affliction many times before. As gene-gifts went, it was barely a blessing.

  Sins of the father, he thought, watching Talos’s inert armour, listening to the cries of death to come. How they are reflected within the son.

  According to Cyrion’s retinal chrono display, one hour and sixteen minutes had passed when he heard the explosion.

  The decking shuddered under his boots.

  “Xarl? Uzas?”

  Static was the only answer.

  Great.

  When Uzas’s voice finally broke over the vox after two hours, it was weak and coloured by his characteristic bitterness.

  “Hnngh. Cyrion. It’s done. Drag the prophet.”

  “You sound like you got shot,” Cyrion resisted the urge to smile in case they heard it in his words.

  “He did,” Xarl said. “We’re on our way back.”

  “What was that detonation?”

  “Plasma cannon.”

  “You’re… you’re joking.”

  “Not even for a second. I have no idea why they brought one of those to a fight in a ship’s innards, but the coolant feeds made for a ripe target.”

  Cyrion blink-clicked a rune by Xarl’s identification symbol. It opened a private channel between the two of them.

  “Who hit Uzas?”

  “An initiate. From behind, with a sniper rifle.”

  Cyrion immediately closed the link so no one would hear him laugh­ing.

  The Covenant of Blood was a blade of cobalt darkness, bronze-edged and scarred by centuries of battle. It drifted through the void, sailing close to its prey like a shark gliding through black waters.

  The Encarmine Soul was a Gladius-class frigate with a long and proud history of victories in the name of the Blood Angels Chapter—and before it, the IX Legion. It opened fire on the Covenant of Blood with an admirable array of weapons batteries.

  Briefly, beautifully, the void shields around the Night Lords strike cruiser shimmered in a display reminiscent of oil on water.

  The Covenant of Blood returned fire. Within a minute, the blade-like ship was sailing through void debris, its lances cooling from their momentary fury. The Encarmine Soul, what little chunks were left of it, clanked and sparked off the larger cruiser’s void shields as it passed through the expanding cloud of wreckage.

  Another ship, this one stricken and dead in space, soon fell under the Covenant’s shadow. The strike cruiser obscured the sun, pulling in close, ready to receive its boarding pod once again.

  First Claw had been away for seven hours investigating the hulk. Their mothership had come hunting for them.

  Bulkhead seals hissed as the reinforced doors opened on loud, grinding hinges.

  Xarl and Cyrion carried Talos into the Covenant’s deployment bay. Uzas walked behind them, a staggering limp marring his gait. His spine was on fire from the sniper’s solid slug that still lodged there. Worse, his genhanced he
aling had sealed and clotted the wound. He’d need surgery—or more likely a knife and a mirror—to tear the damn thing out.

  One of the Atramentar, elite guard of the Exalted, stood in its hulking Terminator war plate. His skull-painted, tusked helm stared impassively. Trophy racks adorned his back, each one impaled with several helms from a number of loyalist Astartes Chapters: a history of bloodshed and betrayal, proudly displayed for his brothers to see.

  It nodded to Talos’s prone form.

  “The Soul Hunter is wounded?” the Terminator asked, its voice a deep, rumbling growl.

  “No,” Cyrion said. “Inform the Exalted at once. His prophet is suffering another vision.”

  The Dark Path

  Gav Thorpe

  Fields of golden crop bent gently in a magical breeze as the palace of Prince Thyriol floated across Saphery. A shimmering vision of white and silver towers and dove-wing buttresses, the citadel eased across the skies with the stately grace of a cloud. Slender minarets and spiralling steeples rose in circles surrounding a central gilded needle that glimmered with magic.

  The farmers glanced up at the familiar beauty of the citadel and returned to their labours. If any of them wondered what events passed within the capital, none made mention of it to their companions. From the ground the floating citadel appeared as serene and ordered as ever, a reassuring vision to those that wondered when the war with the Naggarothi would come to their lands.

  In truth, the palace was anything but peaceful.

  Deep within the alabaster spires, Prince Thyriol strode to a wooden door at the end of a long corridor and tried to open it. The door was barred and magically locked. There were numerous counter-spells with which he could negotiate the obstacle, but he was in no mood for such things. Thyriol laid his hand upon the white-painted planks of the door and summoned the wind of fire. As his growing anger fanned the magic, the paint blistered and the planks charred under his touch. As Thyriol contemplated the treachery he had suffered, and his own blindness to it, the invisible flames burned faster and deeper than any natural fire. Within ten heartbeats the door collapsed into cinders and ash.

  Revealed within was a coterie of elves. They looked up at their prince, startled and fearful. Bloody entrails were scattered on the bare stone floor, arranged in displeasing patterns that drew forth Dark Magic. They sat amidst a number of dire tomes bound with black leather and skin. Candles made of bubbling fat flickered dully on stands made from blackened iron. Sorcery seethed in the air, milking Thyriol’s gums itch and slicking his skin with its oily touch.

  The missing mages were all here, forbidden runes painted upon their faces with blood, fetishes of bone and sinew dangling around their necks. Thyriol paid them no heed. All of his attention was fixed upon one elf, the only one who showed no sign of fear.

  Words escaped Thyriol. The shame and sense of betrayal that filled Thyriol was beyond any means of expression, though some of it showed in the prince’s face, twisted into a feral snarl even as tears of fire formed in his eyes.

  Faerie lights glittered from extended fingertips and silver coronas shimmered around faces fixed in concentration as the young mages practised their spells. Visions of distant lands wavered in the air and golden clouds of protection wreathed around the robed figures. The air seemed to bubble with magical energy, the winds of magic made almost visible by the spells of the apprentices.

  The students formed a semicircle around their tutors at the centre of a circular, domed hall—the Grand Chamber. The white wall was lined with alcoves containing sculptures of marble depicting the greatest mages of Ulthuan; some in studious repose, others in the flow of flamboyant con­jurations, according to the tastes of successive generations of sculptors. All were austere, looking down with stern but not unkindly expressions on future generations. Their looks of strict expectation were repeated on the faces of Prince Thyriol and Menreir.

  “You are speaking too fast,” Thyriol told Ellinithil, youngest of the would-be mages, barely two hundred years old. “Let the spell form as words in your mind before you speak.”

  Ellinithil nodded, brow furrowed. He started the conjuration again but stuttered the first few words.

  “You are not concentrating,” Thyriol said softly, laying a reassuring hand on the young elf’s shoulder. He raised his voice to address the whole class. “Finish your incantations safely and then listen to me.”

  The apprentices dissipated the magic they had been weaving; illusions vapourised into air, magical flames flickered and dimmed into darkness. As each finished, he or she turned to the prince. All were intent, but none more so that Anamedion, Thyriol’s eldest grandson. Anamedion’s eyes bore into his grandfather as if by his gaze alone he could prise free the secrets of magic locked inside Thyriol’s mind.

  “Celabreir,” said Thyriol, gesturing to one of the students to step forward. “Conjure Emendeil’s Flame for me.”

  Celabreir glanced uncertainly at her fellow apprentices. The spell was one of the simplest to cast, often learnt in childhood even before any for­mal teaching had begun. With a shrug, the elf whispered three words of power and held up her right hand, fingers splayed. A flickering golden glow emanated from her fingertips, barely enough to light her slender face and brazen hair.

  “Good,” said Thyriol. “Now, end it and cast it again.”

  Celabreir dispersed the magic energy with a flick of her wrist, her fingertips returning to normal. Just as she opened her mouth to begin the incantation again, Thyriol spoke.

  “Do you breathe in or out when you cast a spell?” he asked.

  A frown knotted Celabreir’s brow for a moment. Distracted, she missed a syllable in the spell. Shaking her head, she tried again, but failed.

  “What have you done to me, prince?” she asked plaintively. “Is this some counter-spell you are using?”

  Thyriol laughed gently, as did Menreir. Thyriol nodded for the other mage to explain the lesson and returned to his high-backed throne at the far end of the hall.

  “You are thinking about how you breathe, aren’t you?” said Menreir.

  “I… Yes, I am, master,” said Celabreir, her shoulders slumping. “I don’t know whether I breathe in or out when I cast. I can’t remember, but if I think about it I realise that I might be doing it differently because I am aware of it now.”

  “And so you are no longer concentrating on your control of the magic,” said Menreir. “A spell you could cast without effort you now find… prob­lematic. Even the most basic spells are still fickle if you do not have total focus. The simplest distraction—an overheard whisper or a flicker of movement in the corner of the eye—can be the difference between suc­cess and failure. Knowing this, who can tell me why Ellinithil is having difficulty?”

  “He is thinking about the words and not the spell,” said Anamedion, a hint of contempt in his voice. He made no attempt to hide his boredom. “The more he worries about his pronunciation, the more distracted his inner voice.”

  “That’s right,” said Thyriol, quelling a stab of annoyance. Anamedion had not called Menreir “master”, a title to which he had had earned over many centuries, a sign of growing disrespect that Thyriol would have to address. “Most of you already have the means to focus the power you need for some of the grandest enchantments ever devised by our people, but until you can cast them without effort or thought, that power is useless to you. Remember that the smallest magic can go a long way.”

  “There is another way to overcome these difficulties,” said Anamedion, stepping forward. “Why do you not teach us that?”

  Thyriol regarded Anamedion for a moment, confused.

  “Control is the only means to master true magic,” said the prince.

  Anamedion shook his head, and half-turned, addressing the other stu­dents as much as his grandfather.

  “There is a way to tap into magic, unfettered by incantation and ritual,” said Anamedion. “Shaped by instinct and powered by raw magic, it is pos­sible to cast the greates
t spells of all.”

  “You speak of sorcery,” said Menreir quickly, throwing a cautioning look at the apprentices. “Sorcery brings only two things: madness and death. If you lack the will and application to be a mage, then you will certainly not live long as a sorcerer. If Ellinithil or Celabreir falter with pure magic, the spell simply fails. If one miscasts a sorcerous incantation, the magic does not return to the winds. It must find a place to live, in your body or your mind. Even when sorcery is used successfully, it leaves a taint, on the world and in the spirit. It corrupts one’s thoughts and stains the winds of magic. Do not even consider using it.”

  “Tell me from where you have heard such things,” said Thyriol. “Who has put these thoughts in your mind?”

  “Oh, here and there,” said Anamedion with a shrug and a slight smile. “One hears about the druchii sorcerers quite often if one actually leaves the palace. I have heard that any sorcerer is a match for three Sapherian mages in power.”

  “Then you have heard wrong,” said Thyriol patiently. “The mastery of magic is not about power. Any fool can pick up a sword and hack at a lump of wood until he has kindling, but a true woodsman knows to use axe and hatchet and knife. Sorcery is a blunt instrument, capable only of destruction, not creation. Sorcery could not have built this citadel, nor could sorcery have enchanted our fields to be rich with grain. Sorcery burns and scars and leaves nothing behind.”

  “And yet Anlec was built with sorcery,” countered Anamedion.

  “Anlec is sustained by sorcery, but it was built by Caledor Dragontamer, who used only pure magic,” Thyriol replied angrily.

  He shot glances at the others in the room, searching for some sign that they paid undue attention to Anamedion’s arguments. There was rumour, whispered and incoherent, that some students, and even some mages, had begun to experiment with sorcery. It was so hard for Thyriol to tell. Dark Magic had been rising for decades, fuelled by the rituals and sacri­fices of the Naggarothi and their cultist allies. It polluted the magical vortex of Ulthuan, twisting the Winds of Magic with its presence.