The Emperor's Gift Read online

  I’d seen daemons wither in the aura of our united anger. This was something else, something worse.

  ‘Go…’ I voxed the word through teeth I couldn’t unclench. Galeo, siphoning our energies for the execution, was the only one walking forwards untroubled. He broke into a run, kicking off from the decking to launch at the possessed husk. The blade in his hands rippled with energy, the strength of our souls in fiery form.

  The blade descended, falling like a star from the night sky, all retinal purple and screaming white flame – and ceased dead in the air, caught in the man’s skinless hands.

  ‘No.’

  Movement, over my shoulder. I turned, even as my brothers turned, and faced the trap we’d known we were walking into.

  SIX

  THE NEVERBORN

  I

  Gashes in reality heralded their arrival, roaring and screaming as they made themselves known. The Neverborn melted out from the shadows; from the broken stained-glass friezes;, and from the airless air itself.

  Each one was angelic in form, possessing spectral radiance in place of wings, yet each was debased by flayed wounds, weeping blood from the carvings across their pale skin. Unarmed they came, silent in the airlessness, with lashes of bleached light reaching from their shoulders. Their eyes bled the deepest, richest red.

  We needed no warning, as we reacted at once, but not as one. Dumenidon’s great blade, the twin to Galeo’s, slashed out in a blazing arc, cleaving the closest creature in two. Bisected, the angel tumbled away through the chamber, beautiful hands still reaching for us. Those pale fists opened and closed like the mouth of an asphyxiating fish.

  ‘Wraith Angels.’ Dumenidon’s voice was brittle over the vox. ‘Don’t let them attach their mouths to your armour.’

  Sothis and Malchadiel were exemplars of unity, shadowing one another’s movements, cutting and carving with their shorter falchions. I blocked a toothed lash of light with my wrist guard, letting it skid across the ceramite vambrace before thundering a boot into the thing’s chest. The impact shattered its ribs, if the crunching sensation was anything to judge by. A second kick had the effect I’d hoped for; my attacker, a shrieking thing with the swollen yellow eyes of a drowned man, crashed back into his floating kindred.

  All around us, they drifted closer with no regard for physics, ghosting through the vacuum on unseen forces. I counted fifty in a single scan, though their limbs and bodies melded together, overlapping as they neared.

  A glance spared towards the justicar showed that his two-handed blade still hadn’t fallen clean. Galeo heaved down with its weight, head turned from the Navigator’s glare, while the ragged mutant trapped the blade between its hands.

  +I know you, Anathema’s son.+ The Navigator’s words carried through all our minds. +I smell your soul. You are the Tongueless One, forever silenced by R’vanha of the Venomous Lash.+

  I sensed Galeo’s anger as a physical force, spilling from him like infection from a sour wound. His focus was slipping, though his grip on the blade was not. +She still laughs about it, even as she rides the warp’s winds. You remember her, do you not? You remember how she burst your brothers’ hearts, and stole your voice with a crack of her whip…+

  ‘Get in the fight, Hyperion,’ Dumenidon hissed.

  The poisoned celestials moved with a will, interlacing their corona-flare wings to form a silent host between us and our embattled justicar. The barricade of unhealthy light blazed from floor to ceiling. Whatever animated them was growing stronger. I could hear the psychic chorus as they murmured, though what such things had to say to each other was beyond me.

  Malchadiel and Sothis slammed back to back, their blades carving out in each other’s defence. Dumenidon cut around them, joining with me. He cleaved the head from one of the creatures above us, and I hurled the body away with a burst of kinetic force, sending it spinning and crashing through its grim choir-kin. Fire sprayed from my open hand in a sorcerous torrent, igniting those foes closest to us. Even burning, they fought on until the white fire immolated them beyond hope of movement.

  ‘The justicar,’ I voxed. ‘I can reach him.’

  ‘No.’ Dumenidon backed against me. ‘Stay with us. Galeo is holding.’

  ‘Guard me, Dumenidon.’

  ‘Don’t. Don’t do it.’

  I couldn’t run, so I crouched. A moment’s thought set a rune on my retinal display flashing white.

  ‘Fool,’ Dumenidon breathed. Another bisected celestial fell past me, twisting in two directions.

  My armour’s internal hum became an angry whine in sympathy with the vibration of accumulating power between my shoulder blades. A coil of witch-lightning danced down my arm. Others arced from my power pack, keenly serpentine, leaping and crackling.

  I focused on Galeo, on the ground by his boots as he was being forced back.

  ‘Emperor guide you,’ Dumenidon said.

  I couldn’t reply. I couldn’t break my murmured Chant of Repulsion.

  ‘…the strength to repel the corruption that lies unseen–’

  II

  Entering the warp unprotected is nothing less than madness. We’re taught this from the first night we leave our holding cells in the monastery.

  There was a brutal crack of discharging power, and the occlusiam shattered before me, flensed from my sight as surely as if the scene had been skinned from the surface of my eyes.

  I ran thirty steps, only it wasn’t running. I swam it without swimming, and leapt without jumping. The distance meant nothing, and in truth neither did the direction. Such things, even in the vaguest terms, were byproducts of the strained, human need to codify what the five senses tell the brain.

  For a breath’s span, I stared into a sea of searing plasma, comprised of colours that couldn’t exist, formed from a billion faces mouthing my name. The tides shrieked their many voices into my head, crying their lies, their weakness, and their pain.

  Some say the Emperor’s Gift makes us immune to corruption. This may be so, or it may be that our resistance requires a simple explanation for our Inquisitorial masters’ minds. Sometimes I believe our lords and mistresses within the ordos fail to understand this about us. As sons of Titan, we are incorruptible through devotion, attaining purity only through tireless effort. No soul is born perfect, but a warrior can be bred to become it.

  I moved the moment I fell into the ocean between worlds, plunging through the screaming tides, and focused on the last sight I’d seen: the decking next to Galeo. This, I held in my mind to the exclusion of all else.

  Ignoring the press of Hell’s tides against my armour, I projected myself forwards, running thirty paces without moving a muscle. On the last step, I killed the power surging into my backpack, and tumbled out of the storm.

  III

  ‘–behind the veil of blessed ignorance.’

  The prayer finished, leaving my lips by rote as reality reasserted itself with a sonic boom. I was already spinning my stave in a fan-blade’s revolution to build speed, and as the Navigator turned to face me, the silver-shod haft cracked against his temple. He rocked to the side as his spine gave way with a crackling crunch I shouldn’t have been able to hear in the vacuum. Such a blow would have torn the head from a mortal man.

  On a flopping neck, he brought his tilted face around again. My second strike blinded him in the only way that mattered, lancing into the juicy socket where his third eye nested. The orb split with a cracking wrongness – a pebble smashed underfoot rather than the jellied pop I expected. My hands were itching in their gauntlets as I pulled my stave free. Above his human eyes, his head now barely existed.

  I saw myself – the reflection I cast in his two remaining eyes. My helm angled down in threat; the ornate stave effortlessly turning in armoured grey hands; my armour still alive with snake-cracks of lightning, arcing out from the conductive nodes on my power pack.

  Galeo’s blade ended the image. The Navigator flew apart, not only cleaved in half but blasted into viscera
by the justicar’s anger. Strength flooded me, flooded through each of us, as our leader returned our borrowed energy.

  +That was foolish, Hyperion. Focus.+

  I didn’t reply. My spinning stave crashed out at the Neverborn closest to us, punching through throats and crunching through their bleeding eyes. Each strike hissed when I drew the haft free. Runes carved into the sacred silver steamed at every contact.

  But the Navigator’s destruction rang cold. I’d felt no cry of thwarted rage so common to the Neverborn in their final moments before banishment. Galeo’s words threatened to make unpleasant sense; if my interruption had allowed the daemon to flee its host before the body had been executed…

  In that battle, time lost its hold on my senses. Even an eidetic mind cannot process a thousand actions undertaken through instinct when you move faster than perception can follow. My stave spun and cracked, stabbed and crushed. Each strike was a killing blow, as lethally sure as any rending sword or pounding hammer.

  They tore at us, grabbed at us, weighing us down with sheer numbers. One of them clawed at my throat from behind, its desperate fingers disengaging one of the seals at my collar. Warning runes flashed across my eye lenses, warning of venting air – as if I couldn’t feel it sucked from my lungs in a dragging heave.

  The weight was blessedly gone a second later, and I heard the tolling bell of Galeo’s blade striking daemonic skin.

  +I told you to focus,+ he said, his silent voice coloured by effort.

  A fist thump resealed the collar lock. I breathed again. ‘You could show some gratitude,’ I voxed, and in my agitation I sent the words psychically in the same moment. It was the most disrespect I’d ever shown to my justicar, and the fact shamed me.

  A second psychic pulse triggered the generators within my stave, and blurry iridescence hummed from between my gauntlets.

  IV

  Of the many weapons forged in our monastery’s subterranean foundries, few required the same complexity and care in their crafting as a nemesis warding stave. Like any nemesis-breed weapon, its inbuilt matrix was a shielded, inert core awaiting psychic activation, and just like the more traditional blades, its functions could only be activated by the thoughts of the warrior it had been built for. And there the similarities ended.

  Every stave bore a headpiece of punishingly rare purity. I’d seen a small handful topped by the armoured skulls of Imperial saints, or psykers of great majesty. My own was rarer still.

  Atop the stave, haloed by consecrated gold, was the skull of Justicar Castian, veined by mercury-threaded circuitry. Ceramite plating had preserved the relic for these last one hundred centuries.

  I am no scribe, and certainly no poet. Words have failed me often enough in my life, but I doubt anyone could do justice to the sense of honour I felt when Galeo presented me with the weapon upon accepting me into his squad. I’d trained with staves, just as I’d trained with every weapon available in our armoury, but I’d never expected to be given one to wield upon passing my knighthood trials.

  A warding stave’s haft was an adamantite sheath encrusted with hexagrammic banishment runes, constructed to house several linked, amplified refractor field generators. Psychic activation awakened them, priming the stave for its defensive use as more than a daemon-slaying weapon.

  If I had to estimate for the sake of archival completion, I would say that I activated my stave between sixteen and eighteen seconds after completing my teleport jump.

  V

  It flared in my hands, banishing the darkness in staccato flashes as each impact I blocked displaced its kinetic energy as spreading light. A fist, a leering mouth, a lashing wing – all of them burst in pale brilliance as they met the refractor field’s resistance. Likewise, every blow I hammered into the enemy sent illuminated detonations playing across the chamber, the way sheet lightning turned night to day on its own intermittent whim.

  I wasn’t a swordsman. I couldn’t stand back to back with one of my brothers; I needed the room to spin and swing the power stave. In an atmosphere, the jagged discharges were accompanied by the active stave’s baritone growl, and the wheel-skidding shrieks of the refraction aura deflecting incoming kinetics. In the vacuum, only silence reigned.

  I no longer fought to injure the implacable bodies pressing against us. Every blow was a block, every whirling twist made to buy a moment’s freedom from the raining tendrils. The few short seconds I could spare from wielding the stave were spent repelling the creatures back with focused thrusts of concentration. On the third repel, a host of daemons flew back on a tide of invisible force, buying us another few seconds to breathe before they could attack once more.

  I made the mistake of letting my thoughts graze their consciousness. A tidal flow of anger, black and bleak and cold, flooded through me. Banishing that cost me another moment’s concentration.

  +Focus!+ The justicar’s voice was ripe and urgent. +You are throwing away your energy without a care.+

  There was no arguing there. I knew he spoke the truth.

  One of my more vicious blows cracked shards of frozen flesh clean from one creature’s head, ripping a streak of glassy skin free. The flayed skull that met my gaze bore a rune engraved into its forehead. A second blow rammed a metre of silver stave through the thing’s face. Crystallised, black vomit sparkled into the air from its shattered jaws, and instead of coming for me a third time, the silver of my weapon set the creature’s flesh aflame. It surged backwards, writhing in a blanket of white fire that needed no air to burn. Faith was its fuel.

  ‘The heads,’ I voxed to the others. ‘Runes mimic a third eye.’

  Instantly, my brothers’ blows changed, abandoning dismemberment and heart-strikes in favour of splitting skulls. Bodies spilled back from us, wreathed in holy flame as they dissolved. Ash rattled against our armour, scoring the surface like grit.

  The five of us fought our way together, though not without cost. By the time we stood in a united ring, Sothis was limping, the back of his knee joint venting a soft hiss of air. Dumenidon, the only one of us always so dedicated to fighting in absolute silence, was whispering a benediction against pain.

  I was tiring fast. We all were; I sensed my brothers’ efforts as clearly as I felt my own, and unleashing this much psychic force was taking its toll on each of us. There was a reason we usually channelled our might through the justicar. He had the training to measure it as a precious commodity, and spend it most carefully.

  Physical weariness was less of a worry. Our genetic enhancements would allow us to fight until the system’s star went cold; I had once duelled Malchadiel for a hundred and twenty-two hours before finally landing the winning strike, and even then, he failed due to misjudging his footwork rather than exhaustion.

  ‘This is like holding back an ocean,’ Malchadiel voxed, ‘by standing on the shore and shouting “Stop”.’ His complaint was cut off by something striking his helm. I couldn’t risk turning to see what.

  ‘We’re winning,’ Sothis countered. ‘That’s all that matters.’

  A silently shrieking face crashed against my shoulder guard, the pliant lips pressing to the frosty ceramite and sticking fast. Insidious tension locked my arm into spasms, the muscles no longer obeying at all. I couldn’t bring my stave to bear.

  With my free hand, I clutched the daemon’s face, fingers gripping the grotesquely beautiful flesh. Its skull hummed, then cracked, then came apart completely. Fluids bubbled from the mess, forming a flow of perfect spheres. A psychic shove blasted it away the same moment another attached itself to my forearm. This one clung with a lamprey’s tenacity, stealing heat from my armour with its sucking kiss. I released a burst of psychic fire to throw it free.

  Nothing happened. My eyes grew heavy, my hearts cold, my reflexes sluggish. I mustered the concentration for another psy-thrust, but focus eluded me. I could think of nothing beyond my weakening limbs.

  The weakness, the helplessness, was achingly familiar. This – or something so very like it �
� had happened before. Why couldn’t I recall it with any clarity? Was it from my life before coming to Titan? A shadow from my days and nights before waking in that cold cell?

  Yes. I could almost see it before me: the cold, cold hallways of an abandoned ship. A name that eluded me – the name of a king seated upon a black throne.

  I…

  +Brother.+

  I opened my eyes, only then realising they’d been closed. As vision cleared, target locks and bio-data streamed back in flickering urgency. ‘Brother,’ Sothis said, with his voice this time. ‘You’re drifting.’

  He gripped a fistful of the angel’s silver-thread hair and tore the creature free, wrenching its head back, baring its sleek throat. Where its mouth had been on my armour, a discoloured bruise warped the ceramite, while it stared at me with depthless, malicious sentience. A hacking chop slit the celestial’s throat, and Sothis carved his sword through the neck, back and forth like a bone-saw.

  Two more crashed into him from behind; he whirled to deal with them, blades in hand. The released angel reached for me again, leaping into a single stave thrust against its half-severed head. As the cracking impact finished Sothis’s work, I repelled the burning angel away with a pulse of psychic force. It drifted in immolating serenity.

  ‘This is too easy,’ I breathed over the vox. ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘Easy?’ Sothis laughed. I shared his senses for a moment, drawn into his skull by the ferocity of his emotions. The venting of his air supply from the crack by his knee was causing him more concern than he wished to admit. He yanked both falchions from the chest of his enemy, and decapitated the body with a backhanded cleave. Glittering red gems dribbled from the severance as the seraph burst into smokeless flame. A kick to the sternum sent the corpse drifting away, spinning and tumbling.