Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumus

TWO

Praeparatio

Darkness had come to Phobian, and the icefields and glaciers were blue under the pitiless stars.

High up in the savage peaks of the Argahasts, however, the shadows of the Dark Planet were rent asunder by clusters of magnesium-bright light. The fortress of Mors Angnar was come to life. It pulsed and rumbled and thundered until it seemed that the very roots of the mountains were set in tremor by subterranean activity.

The vibrations triggered a dozen great avalanches downslope, filling whole valleys. It was as though some buried god were struggling to wake from sleep.

The servitors had been labouring in their hundreds all through the night. For the first time in years the vault doors of the Arsenal had been thrown open wide enough for vehicles, and now heavy wheeled and tracked transports were thundering up and down the concentric access ramps to the deepest ammunition stores of the Chapter.

Outside, the landing fields were being bulldozed clear of snow and ice to allow the heavy shuttles of the fleet to land. These pads had been built into the very mountainside of Anghir-Adhon itself, the sheer-sided peak which formed the spine of the Dark Hunters fortress. They projected out like flat-topped fungi protruding from the trunk of a mighty tree.

Normally the inbuilt heating systems of the landing-pads would keep them clear, but at certain times of the year even they could not keep pace with the accumulation of ice and snow, and so the weariless servitors would man the dozers and attack the drifts, shunting them off so that hundreds of tons of frozen rock and frost-cemented snow tumbled to the valley three thousand metres below.

Already, in the gaps between the whipping clouds, stars brighter than nature were glittering and wheeling above the mountain; the heavy shuttles of the fleet circling in holding patterns high above, impatient to land.

Mortai Company’s first sergeant breathed the gelid air deep into his massive chest. Brother-Sergeant Fornix was dressed informally in the fur-trimmed hides many of the Dark Hunters donned when outdoors on their home world.

He had a long, narrow face with a beak-like nose. One eye glinted pale as a frosted stone. The other gleamed dull red, the ocular buried in a fist of scar-tissue. His black hair was shorn close to the scalp except where one lock had been grown long to dangle plaited in front of his right ear.

Only a few long-serving veterans of the Dark Hunters wore the scalp-lock which was a legacy of their savage Primarch, Jaghatai. It was considered old-fashioned, a throwback to forgotten times, like the ritualistic scarring which had all but died out in the Chapter in the last century.

The reinforced plascrete of the landing field quivered under the thunder of the heavy transports; and now something more, also. A giant stumped up behind Fornix, a five-metre automaton as broad as it was tall, steam billowing from twin exhausts on its back, and the gyros of its mighty arms and clawed hands whirring. Fornix turned and smiled at the monster.

‘Forge-Master! My lord, I trust you do not feel the cold too keenly.’

A pause, and then there was what might have been termed a metallic grunt, echoing deep in the massive sarcophagus that was the chest of the Dreadnought.

‘The last time I felt cold, whelp, the Imperium was a lot younger, and full of better men than you.’

‘I’m sure it still is full of better men than me,’ Fornix grinned. ‘But I have yet to meet them.’

Again, the massive snort from the machine, like a backfiring engine. The Dreadnought raised one huge clawed arm and playfully set it down on Fornix’s shoulder for just a second, raising it as the Space Marine’s legs began to buckle.

Fornix rubbed his shoulder. ‘Your touch is as light as ever, Breughal.’

‘And your mouth never sleeps, Fornix.’ This time the lightness of something like a chuckle echoed from the towering figure, cold and strange out of that metallic heart.

They stared together at the endless convoys passing over the ramps before them, and Fornix raised his head to catch the distant lights among the night clouds that looked like stars, and yet were not.

‘It is about time,’ he breathed. ‘Nigh on two years it has been, since my bolter was aimed at anything more than a target drone.’

‘In those two years we have brought forty-six more battle-brothers into the Chapter, refitted the frigate Temujin, and restored the Land Raider Mindarion to holy function,’ Breughal said. ‘You must think of the long game, brother, as your captain and the Kharne do. What are two years, when we have the millennia-old war to fight?

‘We cannot all undergo symbiosis, brother,’ Fornix said, his grin fading. ‘For some of us there is a window of years during which we must have our strength set to use. I am no longer young, even by the standards of our Adept. I would not live my life in endless training for wars that pass us by. I thank the Emperor, our bright lord, that we have this chance now once more to seek redemption in battle.’

The Dreadnought whirred and wheezed above him. ‘Well said, brother,’ Breughal told him. ‘You sound almost like Jonah,’ he added.

‘Well don’t ever tell him that, for Phobos’s sake. He’ll think I’m becoming sane and sensible at last.’

‘Sanity comes to us all in the end.’

Fornix thumped the ceramite kneecap of the Dreadnought. ‘What think you, Breughal; is this just a raid, or are the Punishers set on conquest? The Cloisters are high with speculation.’

‘And envy, Fornix, that Mortai has been chosen for this mission. The Chapter’s captains say that the Kharne indulges his protégé. Jonah Kerne takes the spearhead once again, when by rights it should be Thuraman.’

‘Jonah is the best we have, Breughal – you know that.’

‘Apart from you?’

‘Apart from me,’ Fornix grinned.

‘They say that when Kerne itches, you scratch, Fornix.’

‘Let them say that to my face, just once, and we shall see who does the scratching.’

There was a moment of almost silence about them, a sudden emptiness to the air itself. Then directly overhead it seemed, a roar exploded about the landing fields, so loud that Fornix’s eardrums felt it as a pressure on the reinforced membranes within his skull. He looked up, to see a bright, blaring light. His eyes, organic and mechanical, adjusted almost instantly, resolving it into the fiery circles of afterburners.

The angular shadow of a heavy shuttle grew around them, and the pad lights flickered as a thousand-ton spacecraft settled down three hundred metres away with a low, sonorous boom, sinking on its landing gear like some immense, tired animal easing its weight upon the earth.

The silence again, almost a kind of reverence. Then ramps whined and creaked open from the shuttle sides, each tall enough to admit a Dreadnought.

Light spilled out, illuminating the falling snow in staircases of bright blizzard. There was a revving and snorting of powerful engines, a few shouted commands from the senior servitors and auxiliaries, and the assorted vehicles gathered around the rim of the landing-pad began to inch forward in sequence, while from the sides of the shuttle crane-arms extended from their niches, each thirty or forty metres long, and began to reach out for cargo-loads like the grasping legs of a bulbous spider.

Fornix heard the muttering datastream of the servitors as it was run through Breughal’s interior vox-channels. The Forge-Master shifted slightly on his gargantuan chassis and issued orders in binaric – a tongue that only a very few in the Chapter still understood. A carmine gleam came and went in what passed for the Dreadnought’s eyes.

‘Very good,’ he said at last, as the loading operation went on.

‘When shall Mortai embark?’ Fornix asked him.

‘Not until tomorrow. What is to be disembarked last must go on first. Space Marines are always the final element.’

‘It will give me a chance to beg and borrow some more wargear. Who knows what we’ll need when we finally make planetfall?’

‘You were ever profligate with equipment, Fornix. I recall with regret some of the holy instruments of destruction my servitors laboured over for years, only to see them reduced to battered scrap in your hands in the space of a day.’

‘Ah, but what a day,’ Fornix said. ‘How better for a sacred weapon to end its days than–’

‘Buried in the forehead of an ork?’

‘Needs must, my lord Forge-Master. I had no time to change magazines, and the ork was Grazmach Ghar of the Long Bleed. A worthy opponent in many ways. He fought on for a full minute after I had battered his skull into pieces.’

‘Your advancing years have not dimmed your recklessness, Fornix.’

‘I am reckless with everything except my brothers’ lives. ‘Twas always thus.’

‘Indeed. I have heard it said that the Emperor smiles on certain fools who amuse him – but only for a time.’

‘You think my time is running out, Breughal?’

The Dreadnought clenched and unclenched one immense fist. In the heart of its mechanical palm the pilot-light of the flamer buried therein leapt up blue and bright, and then sank down again.

‘Nothing burns forever.’

‘Except faith, and glory,’ Fornix said. ‘Better to burn bright for a day than live a long life in twilight. Here on Phobian the Hunters have been husbanding their strength for a century and a half. Our name has been forgotten, brother. And in other sectors of the galaxy our brethren of other Chapters have won imperishable renown.’

‘We serve,’ Breughal Paine said. ‘That is our duty and our honour. I have seen a millennium come and go, Fornix, and watched the birth and death of legends. I have been alive and awake for all that time – unlike our brethren inside the other Dreadnoughts, I have never slept. It is because of that I believe I have held on to my…’ An instant’s hesitation.

‘My humanity, if you will. With great age comes wisdom, of a sort, or at least the endless cataloguing of experience. I have seen untold follies and disasters, and great victories also, all of them won with blood. The blood of those like ourselves, and that of lesser men. I have seen rivers of it.

‘And through it all, like the Chapter which I serve and love, the Imperium endures. And our task is to see it does so. No more.

‘I watched Lukullus die. I have battled Titans. I have seen the Great Enemy erupt from the warp in numbers almost impossible to grasp – as have you. We cannot afford glory if it diminishes our ability to protect the Imperium we serve. To seek individual renown at the expense of that ultimate mission – that way Chaos lies.’

‘And yet the sword grows dull in the scabbard,’ Fornix muttered, all humour fled from his face.

‘Brother, I would not dwell on it. We are warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, whose lives belong to the service of mankind. So long as man exists amid the stars, so shall we. And in the end, for us, for man – for the universe we have created – there is only war.’

‘Which brings us back to the matter in hand. You did not answer my question, Forge-Master.’

Breughal stood stolid and immense, a dark shadow under the stars with glints of flame for eyes. The snow sizzled as it landed on the hot exhaust stacks at his back.

‘Very well then. Fornix, I do not believe that this is a mere raid. The Punishers are our nemesis, and they have been gone from this sector for what some would consider a long time. They will have used that time. If they were intent on raiding our territories, they would have done so sooner than this.

‘No, it is my belief that this is more likely to be another attempt at all-out invasion.’

Fornix considered the Dreadnought’s words, his head cocked to one side. For a second, what looked like sheer happiness crossed his face.

‘They will know this, Jonah and the Kharne,’ Breughal went on. ‘But they cannot risk Phobian by sending out the main strength of the Chapter. This may be a feint to draw us out.’

‘Mortai are a reconnaissance force then.’

‘No. It is more than that. If I know anything, I think that the Kharne means to fight the main battle as far from our home world as possible. Mortai’s job will be to pin the enemy in place, hold them, and gain intelligence. Then, perhaps, the bulk of the Chapter will become involved.’

There was a rumble deep in the heart of the towering Dreadnought, a kind of restlessness.

‘Your job, Fornix, is the same as it has always been. Your job is to bleed.’

Elijah Kass knelt before the statue of Lukullus in the Reclusiam, his head bowed within his hood. Even in here, the thunder of the embarkation could be heard, and he could feel along the electrodes embedded in his skull the tingle of expectation and speculation that now ran through Mors Angnar, as though the vast fortress and everyone in it were somehow more alive than they had been the day before.

It was unsettling and exhilarating at the same time.

‘We all have our heroes, our mentors, alive and dead,’ a voice said behind him. ‘We come here to reconnect with who we are, to remind ourselves that the greatest heroes are in some sense immortal. We think on them every day, though they are gone to dust and ashes in the passing centuries of history.’

Elijah tugged back his hood. A tall figure in bright blue, the colour of the Librarium, stood looking up at Lukullus Nogai, the man who had saved the Chapter all those years ago, and brought it back from the brink. An old face, broad, bony, with a nose like a flattened mushroom, and on either side of it two eyes as black as obsidian. The high-boned skull was implanted with psionic receivers like his own, though they seemed to have sunk into the wrinkled ivory flesh around them, becoming part of the man.

‘Lord Vennan. I was praying.’

‘Yes. To Lukullus. I would have thought someone else more fitting for one of your calling, Elijah.’

Here Vennan gestured across the chamber to another shadow-shrouded figure. It wore the metal cowl of a psychic hood, and the eyes within it glowed with a blue light, blue as the open sky on a bright day on Phobian. The name on its pedestal read Astanius.

‘He was Lukullus Nogai’s greatest friend, and he saved the legend and lore of the Chapter when all was lost. There were three of them: Lukullus Nogai, Astanius Tor and Breughal Paine. These three champions refounded the Dark Hunters. They saved us from abject degeneration.

‘Paine is still with us, our immortal Forge-Master. Nogai is a legend now, some say a Saint of the Imperium. And Astanius?’ Here Vennan opened his arms in a gesture of futility.

‘He is forgotten by all but a few. We of the Librarium revere his memory, but our brethren of the battle companies barely know his name. And yet without him, we would scarcely know who we are or from what we came.’

The anger came through now in Vennan’s voice.

‘And here you are, a Codicier of my own staff, praying with your back to him.’

Elijah rose. He was half a metre taller than the Chief Librarian, but he bowed his head, chastened.

‘I do not forget our forebear, or what he did, my lord.’

‘Perhaps you would prefer to wield a bolter in the line companies.’

‘No, my lord. I know who I am, and I am eternally grateful for your tutelage.’

Vennan’s eyes glittered. They were entirely black, the legacy of battling the warp for decades.

You will always be different to your brethren, and they will always see that difference, Elijah. Never forget that.

The voice crawled across Elijah’s mind, as bright and painful as the lash of a whip. He knelt once more.

‘You taught me well, lord. I shall not forget what I am – or who made me.’

Vennan glided closer. He set one gnarled hand on his inferior’s head. For a moment, blue light leapt up in infinitesimal sparks from the implants which ringed the bone, and Elijah flinched minutely.

‘You seek promotion to Epistolary, I am told.’

‘I do not seek promotion, but it is true that I have made application through Brother Greiff to join Mortai, yes.’

‘You have a high opinion of your abilities, it would seem. Epistolaries are usually veterans of many wars. What fighting have you seen, Elijah?’

Elijah wiped blood from his upper lip. It was trickling out of his nose in a thin stream.

‘Border skirmishes with the orks, as you know. Boarding actions off Perreken, when we destroyed the Gulbec pirates.’

Vennan lifted his hand. The blood from Elijah’s nose slowed to a drip, then stopped as his body systems repaired the damage. But there was still a shrill ache in his head that needled his mind every time the Chief Librarian spoke.

‘You have known battle, with blade and bolter, it is true. And you have acquitted yourself well – too well perhaps. I have heard it said in the Librarium that you would be well suited as a battle-brother, were it not for your Gift.’

Vennan bent low. ‘And that Gift cannot be denied, or ignored. It must either be trained and utilised, or its bearer must be destroyed. You understand that, do you not, Elijah Kass?’

‘I understand. A psyker is a double-edged sword.’

‘The warp is always there, waiting for us, as tireless as stone, its hunger never sated. You have never known the full extent of its evil and its majesty, Elijah, and yet you lobby to be sent on Captain Kerne’s expedition, where you will meet the Great Enemy at last, and you will experience the true terror of the warp, not diffused among the child-brains of orks or reflected in the intellect of common men, but raw and full-flowered in the psyches of our bitterest foes.

‘Stand up.’

Elijah did so. Vennan looked up at him, as though measuring his bulk.

‘The warp will shrivel you, as it did me. It will attempt to seduce you. It will play on love, Elijah. The love you have for the Emperor, for your Chapter, for your brethren. How do you know you can withstand that form of assault?’

‘I will withstand it, or I will die trying. I will never betray my brothers,’ Elijah said, and his face twisted with anger, eyes growing hot as he looked down on the Chief Librarian.

Strangely, Vennan smiled.

I believe you.

‘There is strength in you, brother. I know that.’ He set a hand on the younger man’s arm. ‘There are only eleven of us left in the Librarium, eleven true Adeptus Astartes with the Gift, or the Curse as some think it. The Dark Hunters have been unfortunate. In my time I have seen some two hundred aspiring psykers fail the tests. Some came all the way through the screening and became Neophytes, before the warp sensed their fledgling minds and consumed them.’

He looked down at his hands. Wide, big-boned, with knuckles white in the pale flesh. ‘I killed them myself, and felt the relief in their souls as they passed into the Emperor’s Peace, out of the reach of the warp forever.’

‘I have felt the warp,’ Elijah said quietly. ‘I have sensed its approach more than once. I have heard the whispers of daemons in my sleep.’

‘Imagine them shouting, screaming, shrieking, laughing in your mind without surcease, day after day, for months on end. The hood helps, but it cannot shield you entirely.

‘In battle with the Great Enemy, Elijah, your torment will be unceasing. You will never know rest, and cannot ever let down your guard. It will come at you even in rare moments of silence, as welcome as a cold drink of water to a parched mouth. It is legion, and can take any form it wishes. Are you ready for that?’

‘I must be ready, some day,’ Elijah said. ‘Whether I stand or fall, there will come a time when I must confront the warp – even as you did, and all the members of the Librarium before me. That is the nature of our calling. You told me that, Brother-Librarian. And, lord, you taught me well.’

Vennan’s stone-dark eyes softened.

‘Know this then, Brother Kass. I am punishing you for your presumption. I will indeed accede to your request, and make you Epistolary Librarian for this expedition. But it is a probationary rank. With you shall go some of our human auxilia, monks of the Lexicanium whom I trust and esteem. They shall counsel you in my absence. And they shall monitor your behaviour. All that you do and say will be reported back to me. What say you to that?’

Elijah bowed, eyes bright.

‘I say thank you, lord, for giving me a chance to prove my faith and serve my Chapter.’

‘Save your gratitude. I send you because my place is here with the Kharne, and your other brethren in the Librarium are even less ready for this than you are. The expedition must have one of us with it. Captain Kerne will need counsel in his dealings with the Great Enemy, and you are well versed in the history of our dealings with them. Also–’ He paused. ‘Captain Kerne himself looks with favour upon your application, and Mortai’s commander is not a man to cross lightly.’

Despite himself, Eijah smiled. At once, a lance of white-cold pain speared through his temples, wrenching a groan from his lips.

You have the strengths and the weaknesses of the young. The worst of those weaknesses is arrogance. Be humble. Among normal humanity you are as a god. To the denizens of the warp you are an insect, to be plucked into the void for their amusement.

Elijah nodded, contrite.

‘Forgive me my pride, lord,’ he whispered.

One last thing, my young Epistolary-to-be. A piece of advice from one who has wrestled with the warp for longer than most.

At the last gasp, when euphoria or despair overcome you, and the warp is as warm and welcoming as the love of your brethren, remember this:

Death is your friend.

They stared at one another, one as bent and gnarled as a wind-warped tree, the other tall and straight with eyes of blazing cobalt, shining with life.

‘I will remember,’ Elijah Kass said.