Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumus

NINE

In Tenebris Hospites

The ship moved through space – a great multi-faceted jewel set with sails. It was an artefact of immense beauty, but something in its lines, the very curves of its hull, would strike the human observer as profoundly unsettling. It was beauty, but not as any human being knew it. Beauty which connected aesthetically, but which had at its core something entirely alien.

The great, strange vessel and its multi-hued solar sails cruised through the void like a ghost, invisible to most augurs.

The Adeptus Astartes had starships that were thousands of Terran years old, but this vessel had been created when mankind was still in its flint-wielding infancy.

The ship was older than the Emperor himself.

‘I love these spaces,’ Te Mirah said, looking out at the elongated forest which carpeted the Runground. For fully a kilometre, the park opened out, the shields drawn back so all the vegetation might have a glimpse of real, unadulterated sunlight from the star.

‘They are the gems of our race. Relics of memory.’

‘From a time when we had entire worlds under our feet. I understand these things, Jellabraiah. I seek only to share a momentary impulse, a second’s pleasure.’

‘I understand, my lady.’

‘You do not, and never will. I mean no insult, Jellabraiah. I merely state fact. I am old, and you are not.’

Jellabraiah bowed.

She ran her slender fingers along the thorns and antlers of her subordinate.

‘Leave me now, my fine and beloved. Go to your work, and blessings be upon you.’

‘Isha protect you, my lady.’

The Bonesinger glided away. Already, her voice had begun to hum and simmer, and in response the wraithbone vibrated like a lightly tapped drum. The beauty of the song was such that it seemed to clasp and entwine with the very living construct of the ship around her.

And yet it could not dispel the unease which had hovered over Te Mirah for long cycles now. As though some black bird were fluttering at the edges of her vision, never to be fully glimpsed, its wings beating in time with her heart.

The black bird, the fetch of Morai-Hag, the black crone of the eldar, who held fate itself in her withered hands.

‘Farseer.’

Te Mirah turned around, her cloak moving with her so that the sigils and stones upon it caught the far-off light of the stars.

She was one of the eldar, a race more ancient than mankind’s dreams. Two metres tall, but as slender as a young willow of Old Earth. Her limbs were long, elongated, and her skull was as fine and smooth as ancient ivory. Her blue-black hair was drawn back in a topknot, and her ears drew up to finely sculpted points.

Her eyes were as blue as the flicker of a far-off star, and she seemed hardly to be flesh and blood and bone at all. Like the starship in which she stood, she was a thing of strange, unsettling beauty.

That which had spoken her title was another cut from the same cloth. Sexless, but taller, and slightly more broad about the shoulders. This one had hair as red as arterial blood, and eyes to match. A male of the species, it had a long, intricately crafted weapon strapped to its back, so ornate that it might well have been a mere affectation. But the blade, where it glittered out of the spine-scabbard, had a cruel, monomolecular edge that would slice through ceramite.

The eyes of this one were no less cruel than the blade, but it bowed as Te Mirah turned round, and there was a flicker of respect in them. More than that; there was something akin to love.

‘Ainoc, I sense you have something for me.’

‘News, farseer. It may be of interest, it may not. I would ask you to accompany me to Steerledge.’

He was hiding something, or attempting to. Behind Ainoc’s usual half-mocking manner there was a dreadful, burning eagerness which she had never seen in him before.

‘Lead on, Ainoc,’ the farseer said, intrigued and disturbed in equal measure.

She turned back once, to look upon the graceful needle-leaf trees, the black earth in which they thrived, and her own folk strolling under them as though they walked a world of their own, without fear. It brought back memories – not her own – but those of her forebears in the spirit stones.

There had been a time when the Void was a place without fear, an ocean to be travelled and explored. There were still memories of that impossibly distant era buried in the Infinity Circuit that beat at the heart of her craftworld, and the yearning of the souls in the stones communicated itself to all of her race, so that they were forever searching, forever dissatisfied with this rootless existence.

They were exiles, and had been for untold millennia, but they never reconciled themselves to the fact.

The two eldar travelled smoothly through the length of the great ship like ghosts, their minds reaching out and touching in welcome and salutation those they passed in the arcing, soaring swoops of passageways which connected up the compartments within. They felt the song of the Bonesingers in the hull, a comforting threnody.

Unlike the brutish vessels of lesser species, the Eldar cruiser speared through space with the smooth, silent efficiency of a living thing wholly in harmony with its environment. There was a low-level consciousness to the ship, and the very stuff of which it was made was in tune with the thoughts of its crew. It fed upon the affection and reverence of the Bonesingers, growing stronger as they communed with it.

Steerledge opened out before them, a curve of white wraithbone with void-shielded windows open to the bright dark of the stars. It soared up in ribs and vaults high above their heads, so that it seemed they were within the very anatomy of a vast, placid organism which protected and sustained them. And that was indeed the case.

The eldar crew were silent; there was no need for chatter here. They set their hands on the stones embedded in the protruding wraithbone and felt the course and speed of the ship, its needs and wants. And in turn they gave it commands with the simple slide of a hand across a gleaming stone.

Te Mirah felt the touch of their minds glide across hers as she entered. Steerledge was the place a human, one of the contemptible mon-keigh, might try to label the bridge of the ship. It was here that the nerve-endings and filaments of wraithbone were brought to a single distilled essence, where the vast length of the beautiful Brae-Kaithe could be controlled. Where the weapon-banks had their settings.

‘Anandaiah wishes to speak,’ Ainoc said. ‘She has sensed something which should be of concern to us.’

Te Mirah waited. A young eldar craftseer stepped forward. She was clad in the black, green-limned livery of the Il Kaithe Craftworld, as were they all, and she was barely of an age to be standing upon Steerledge. But Te Mirah sensed at once the latent power in Anandaiah’s mind. This one, she had felt before. There were the makings of a Bonesinger in her, or even something greater.

‘Of late I having been casting our scans out as far as I can, my lady, at first, merely to see how far I could remain attuned to the farseeking of Brae-Kaithe.’

‘That was… enterprising of you,’ Te Mirah said, her voice without inflection.

‘Forgive me. I overreached my station and my training. But I was able to chance upon something which had to be brought to your attention. I have brought it to the sand-table, if you–’

‘Show me,’ Te Mirah said. She felt the trouble in the girl’s emotional tone, and it was not merely that she had gone beyond her station to interlink with Brae-Kaithe’s farseeking scans. Something else there, darker. It was akin to the keen eagerness she had sensed in Ainoc.

They repaired to a wide flat platform of wraithbone, and here Anandaiah closed her eyes and began an intricate series of hand movements which left momentary glimmers in the air of Steerledge. Te Mirah looked at Ainoc, and the warlock tilted his head to one side and smiled.

I still know what best piques your interest, after all these centuries, my lady.

You sense how jaded I have become.

Perhaps. She is impressive, is she not?

She is beautiful also. Did that occur to you?

Most things which occur to you have also occurred to me. And Ainoc smiled, deep memories in his eyes.

Te Mirah did not smile in return. She did not much care for humour, or the flippancy which Ainoc occasionally continued to cultivate. He was a warlock of the Path of Khaine, and she had seen him slaughter thousands of foes with the Witchblade that hung always on his back.

And they had loved once, long ago, when such things still seemed to matter.

But she was the farseer of the Brae-Kaithe, wedded to her beloved ship, and she had watched almost a millennium of the universe come and go. She no longer appreciated his subtle jibes and rallies.

The craftseer was talented. Other eldar gravitated round the sand-table as the echoes of what Anandaiah was doing resonated throughout the chamber.

She was building a model of star-systems – she had not called them out of Brae-Kaithe’s memory stones, but was constructing it from her own memory and intuition. Te Mirah was impressed despite herself, and as the floating lights and novae grew in profusion, hovering above the sand-table like some fireworks display caught frozen in mid-burst, so she began to recognise them, to see familiar patterns in the jewelled glimmer of the stars the young eldar was summoning.

At last it was done.

‘Impressive,’ she said. ‘But to what end is this display?’

The young eldar grasped the shimmering penumbra in her hands and slewed it across the platform. She touched a star and it grew brighter, until it could be seen that there were tiny planets and moons orbiting it.

‘This is the star we know as Pe-Kara,’ she said. ‘The mon-keigh call it Kargad, and the system belongs in what they call their Imperium. But, my lady, I have been delving through the memories of the spirit stones, and the voices of those who have gone into the gems tell me that the Pe-Kara system once belonged to us, and within it is almost certainly one of those planets that we know as the Crone Worlds. It was once a place that the eldar called their own, and walked upon, under whose skies our people lived and loved and–’

‘Impossible,’ Te Mirah said, shaken. ‘The Crone Worlds were all closer to the Eye of Terror. They were overrun and destroyed by the Great Enemy, who holds them still.’

‘On what do you base your assumptions?’ Ainoc asked the craftseer, more gently. Drawing her out. He already knows, Te Mirah realised.

‘I have analysed the composition of the Pe-Kara star. It contains elements in profusion that are found more commonly in those systems close to the Eye of Terror. The star itself has also undergone massive gravitational anomalies in the distant past.

‘I believe that in the upheaval of the Eye of Terror’s creation, this system was pushed farther out across the sector, as though it were afloat upon a pond into which someone had thrown a great stone. We have seen this before, with other planets.’

‘Planets, yes – stars, no,’ Te Mirah said shortly. ‘And the damage done to those planets by the upheaval rendered them uninhabitable, stripped of their atmospheres.’

‘I believe that in the swirling currents of that time, the entire Pe-Kara system was lifted and moved wholesale, a whole section of the void rearranged.

‘It did not occur without extensive damage – there is a broad asteroid belt within the system, and large, moon-sized asteroids litter it. The oldest spirit stones tell us that Pe-Kara corresponds to a star we once knew as Vol-Meroi. It was orbited by seven worlds, and dozens of moons. At present, only one planet of any real size survives in the system. The mon-keigh call it Ras Hanem, but in our own tongue it was once, I believe, the world known as Vol-Aimoi.

‘I have farscanned the planet. The surface is a wasteland, but its basic structure and composition comply with our records of that lost world. The mantle and crust of the planet are laced with solid seams of ore and heavy metals. This may have helped it survive the upheaval of its relocation, which destroyed the other six ancient worlds of the system.

‘My lady, I believe it to be undeniable. Ras Hanem is Vol Aimoi.’

Te Mirah was stunned. The young eldar was staring up at her with painful intensity. She could feel the yearning in Anandaiah’s soul – it resonated with the same emotion in her own.

The need to find some remnant of what they had been, to rescue memories and artefacts of a vanished time from the Void before they were lost forever.

But it could not be, surely… They would have known before now.

‘Why have none of our fleets ever picked up on this before?’ she asked harshly.

‘The Kargad system is within the purview of the most dedicated warriors of the Imperium,’ said Ainoc. He folded his arms, and the lean cast of his features drew into disgust.

‘It is watched over by those among them known as the Adeptus Astartes. The Space Marines. Our people do not choose to have dealings with such fanatics, and such is their brute prowess in war that it has always been deemed too costly to make any deep foray into their territories in this part of the galaxy.’

‘Too costly…’ Te Mirah mused.

But this information changed things. If such a thing could be true, then it would be worth almost anything, any level of risk, to investigate it. A Crone World which had not been overrun by the forces of Chaos – there was no telling what might be buried in its soils. Priceless relics, soulstones, all manner of–

‘There is something more,’ she said suddenly. ‘Something you have not yet told me.’ She felt their unease, even a level of apprehension.

Ainoc nodded. He extended one long hand to Anandaiah, and the young eldar bowed her head.

‘My lady, Vol-Aimoi has been under Imperial control for several millennia, it is true, but in the recent past the forces of Chaos have swept across that sector of space, travelling from the Eye of Terror in vast armadas.

‘They have an interest in the sector which goes beyond their normal lust for conquest and slaughter. The human warriors known as the Adeptus Astartes repelled a huge invasion a hundred and fifty of their solar cycles ago, at great cost to both sides.’

‘You think that the Great Enemy also believes what you conjecture to be true?’ Te Mirah asked.

‘It would explain their repeated attempts to take control of that sector,’ Ainoc said grimly.

‘There are ripples in the warp, playing out from Vol-Aimoi as we speak,’ Anandaiah said. ‘It is what first drew my attention to that sector of space.

‘My lady, Chaos has come again. There is battle and slaughter on the planet – the echoes of it are coursing through the immaterium. The Great Enemy has returned, to lay claim to that ancient world. The Imperium is fighting to keep it. Untold millions have been adding their screams to the currents of the warp, and the carnage is stirring up the Dark Powers.’

I had felt it, Te Mirah thought. I had known it, and ignored it. Ainoc is right – I have become jaded. I should have had an inkling of these events long before some lowly craftseer, no matter how gifted.

She stared at the slowly pulsing star on the summoned display before her.

‘How long have you known this?’ she asked.

Anandaiah lifted her hands. Not long. I–’

‘Not you. Ainoc.’

The warlock had no trace of levity on his fine-drawn face now. His features were set in the white mask which she had seen come upon him in battle.

‘Two turns of shipday, no more.’

Time. Time was running past them like some lithe child, scampering into the Void and taking all their possibilities with it.

No time to send back word to Il Kaithe. No time to consult with the Autarch. They were too far from the craftworld.

Decisions came harder to her now that she was old in the reckoning of her people. She saw more than she once did; the outcomes of every choice she made crowded her mind almost as soon as it was selected.

But she still knew what she had to do.

She looked up at the graceful contours of her beloved ship, the Brae-Kaithe, to which she had been wed for centuries.

Beloved.

She did not want to bring this spouse, this child of hers into harm’s way, but that was the essence of the decision she was about to make.

Forgive me.

Then she raised her head, and her eyes glittered as bright as the summoned stars of the craftseer’s display.

‘Steering, set us a course for the Pe-Kara system. Set more sail and bring us to best speed.’

Her voice rang around the wraithbone vault, as musical as the notes of a song.

‘Ainoc,’ she said to the warlock standing before her. ‘Ready your people. Wake the warriors from the stones.

‘We go to look upon a war.’