Lords of Blood, page 74
‘You do not see yourself in that role,’ said Fresne.
‘How do you know I do not?’ Juvenel asked, although what the steward said was true; he had no desire to usurp the admiral.
Fresne shrugged.
‘Knowing of my habits is not the same as knowing me. I might covet his position. How do you know I’m not moving against him right now? Your whisperers might be everywhere, Fresne, but you can’t know what’s in my mind.’
Fresne raised his eyebrows.
‘Throne damn it, Fresne, I’d know if you had some sumpwitch psyker poking in my brain. I take precautions.’
‘You don’t like me very much, Juvenel. I understand. We both have the best interests of our admiral in mind, but also the best interests of this fleet. If the admiral is declared unfit, then the blow to morale will be immense. The fleet might fragment. What use would that be to the Imperium?’
‘Liking you doesn’t come into it. As it happens, I’ve no time for those who skulk behind the scenes pulling ropes to make us all dance. I prefer an honest fight.’
‘Honest in the way your family secured your commission? They paid rather a lot of money, so I hear.’
Juvenel sucked air through his teeth. ‘Look, I’m trying to warn you. Don’t trust anyone with what’s going on with him. You’re taking a risk here. We are both on the same side, but we might not always be.’
‘I know I am taking a risk, so please prove me right. Help him.’
‘You must be desperate, to agree with me.’
‘I calculate everything, Flag-Lieutenant Juvenel.’
Fresne bowed and disappeared into the dark.
Juvenel waited for Fresne’s footsteps to recede before he pushed the door open.
The empyrean was Guondrin’s birthright. All his life was dedicated to its understanding. All his being was turned to its exploitation. His people knew the warp like few others. They did not fear it.
But Guondrin was afraid.
He sat rigid upon the throne of seeing. His black, pupilless warp eye stared through terrors he would rather not see, fixed upon the oily writhing of Bloodcaller’s Geller shields.
Four others stared with him. Nine thrones were installed in a chamber meant for only one. Four of those were empty. The throne room was rank with sweat. Guondrin had ridden other vessels, in better times, and remembered the days when he felt godlike in the warp. Since the Rift, every voyage was a ride upon a bolting steed, every passage wracked with storm. One Navigator would no longer suffice. Where Navigators’ lives had been measured in centuries, they were now measured in voyages.
There were Navigators in every Great House who refused to sail while the Rift yawned wide. He had not been one of them. He had thirsted for adventure, convinced every trip would bring him more power, more glory.
He had more than his fill of all that.
He missed his silks and wine. He missed his courtesans.
The warp screamed into his face. Terrible visions battered his soul. Every conceivable horror and more was his to suffer. His warp eye ached from staring into the storm.
There was no blazing light of the Astronomican to sail by. In Imperium Nihilus, he must rely on more esoteric means of navigation, following streams of thoughts and fears. The direction of etheric winds and their eddying revealed mass concentrations on the other side of the veil dividing materium from immaterium. At least, that was the theory. Guondrin and his fellows were skilled in the arts of their ancestors, ways preserved since before the ignition of the soul beacon. These skills were little use in the raging chaos the immaterium had become. Were it not for Bloodcaller, Dominance would have been lost.
Guondrin lost sight of the nearest ship, a destroyer of Battlefleet Ultima that raced on with the determination of a hound on the hunt. One moment it was there, a surging, dark shape wrapped in a writhing psychic shield, then it was gone, swallowed up by garish veils of colour thicker than driven rain.
‘Where is it, where it?’ Kaskaskay, to his right, shouted in panic.
‘Keep your eye on the Bloodcaller, forward quadrant, follow the path of the second sign,’ Guondrin said. He panted the words. He tasted blood in his mouth.
‘The Emperor, oh the Emperor, they can see me!’ Kaskaskay said.
‘Emotive wavefront approaching in the vector of the eleventh sign. Increase scry range, thrones two and six,’ Guondrin ordered. ‘We’re losing velocity. We’re going to lose sight of the fleet. Fix position, and find them as soon as the wavefront is past.’
A giant swell of longing washed towards the fleet. Bloodcaller hit it head on, rising up and rushing down the other side, followed by dozens of ships. The Dominance laboured behind. For a moment, Guondrin found himself alone.
Kaskaskay, to his right, began to moan.
‘Notice of import,’ Guondrin said, the words summoning down a servo-skull with the wide horn of a vox protruding from its jaws. ‘Shipmaster, this is Navigator Praecipus Guondrin. We have lost sight of the fleet.’
The servo-skull took his report and sent it to the command deck. So great was the peril to a man’s soul in that room that the skull’s eye sockets were covered over by sanctified cloth. Seeing through the naked oculus endangered the residual spirit said to cling to such devices.
‘Prepare for directional shift on my command.’
Viscid energies streamed from the armourglass, aping water with sinister intent, hiding the play of insanity from the Navigators. Hexagrams inscribed into the surface glowed with brilliant power. All that divided the sorcery within from that without was the imposition of form. Man forced order onto chaos. Chaos would force itself upon order. In the depths of the warp the price of losing the struggle was plain to see.
Guondrin’s mundane eyes blinked under the blindfold tied about his face, daring him to look with mortal sight upon things no human should ever see. His senses were so heightened he felt every thread of the silk weave brush his eyelashes with painful intensity.
‘Attempting to re-establish visual contact,’ he said. His throat was drying. His lips were cracked. ‘Request reduction in speed of ten per cent, begin slow arc port.’ Words of quantity and position meant nothing in the no-places of the warp, but they must be said, and they must be acted upon as if they were real. Acknowledgement of the unreality surrounding them would imperil the ship.
‘Inform astropaths to prepare teleprayers requesting empyrical positioning. Hold before sending. Await my request.’
A heavy surge of terror lifted the ship. Guondrin’s teeth clamped tight. He whispered the first of the twelve orientations to drive the fear from him. Guondrin was a slight being. His warp eye aside, he resembled a baseline human of delicate build, but his bones were voidborn weak. His jaw creaked.
TuMar Ikuo in throne four shrieked.
‘Thone four, maintain emotional balance.’ Guondrin’s words left his mouth barely comprehensible and drenched in spit.
‘Praecipus, I have sight of the Bloodcaller.’
‘Confirm identity of the speaker. I disavow falsehood, and will deny the machinations of the warp. Tell me true, did you speak, throne six?’
‘It is I, Hethen of House Umarri. I vouch for myself, by the Emperor’s grace and mercy.’
Guondrin struggled to perceive a way through a reef of screaming eyes that turned into mouths vomiting multicoloured lightning. Swirls of colour wrapped themselves about his perception, blunting his vision. Fond memories were twisted into the vilest perversions and flung into his soul like darts. He saw everyone he had ever met die a thousand terrible deaths.
‘I see nothing. I do not see the ship.’
‘Predicted position of Bloodcaller in the ninth house of the fourth sign,’ Hethen said.
‘We are turned about!’ Kaskaskay shouted.
‘Maintain calm,’ Guondrin demanded.
The machine-spirit of the Dominance steadied Guondrin. It was single-minded and pure. The four other Navigators were joined in series to Guondrin’s mind via manifold link, and together they worked to triangulate the position of the Bloodcaller. The Dominance sliced through a wall of fear as tall as a galaxy. Warp engines shrieked through the structure of the hull. Scaled hands raked the Geller fields. Nameless beasts led the prow. Still Guondrin peered ahead, risking his sanity for the safe passage of his ship, searching for the Bloodcaller. He saw nothing in the turmoil of the storm, only certain doom.
He felt Kaskaskay losing himself. They were all of different houses, an unusual arrangement, but useful for the spread of differing gifts they brought. Kaskaskay was a tall, spindly creature, born to a strain far removed from the human norm, and they had exchanged few words. Yet through the link Guondrin knew him better than he knew himself. They had shared minds; now he felt Kaskaskay’s mind fail.
Black madness crawled along the neural shunts, threatening to destroy them all. Insanity offered a way for what was out there to get inside. Immediate action was required.
Mercy protocol, throne three, immediate effect. Guondrin’s thoughts were carried away by the hardlines linking him to the vessel. Dominance was an unsentimental ship, and obeyed without demur. The craft trembled. Guondrin felt a panicked thought from his fellow, then it was gone. Kaskaskay slumped forward, his brain smashed. A retractable bolt set at neck height rasped back into its housing. Kaskaskay’s soul was cast into the ocean of being and there devoured. Guondrin saw it happen.
Dominance sailed on. The things swimming in its wake snapped at each other with half-formed jaws. Guondrin could not see them, but he felt them, and their presence sent ice down his spine.
There was a flash of pure light in the unnatural hues of the warp. A vision of a golden angel and a winged shadow in black engaged in vicious battle. They were tiny, too far to see as anything but motes, and yet simultaneously so huge they filled everything. A golden sword connected with a black sword, sending shockwaves through the warp that buffeted the Dominance. Another blow brought a cascade of light of every colour that blew away in unfurling flags. Guondrin gasped with relief.
Against the lightning of the angels’ struggle, he saw Bloodcaller.
‘Bring the ship around, one hundred and twenty degrees to portside. I have the fleet in sight! Ninth house, fourth sign, as you said, Hethen.’
‘My thanks, Praecipus.’
Dominance flew forward, cutting across a notional diagonal to rejoin the flotilla.
‘Thank me when we are out of this storm,’ said Guondrin.
Danakan was sitting in the dark staring into the fireplace when Juvenel came in. He clutched a goblet of wine without drinking from it. He did not look up.
‘Admiral?’ Juvenel said.
Danakan frowned woozily at his first officer. ‘What are you doing here, Juvenel? I thought I politely declined your invitation to dinner. I didn’t expect you to come here to drag me out.’
‘I’m not dragging you anywhere, my lord,’ said Juvenel. He looked about the room for a seat, found one, and pulled it in front of the fire. Parts of the admiral’s outer uniform were draped on the furniture. His meal sat untouched on the long banqueting table. Without servants, Juvenel thought Danakan might quickly slip into slovenly habits. That wasn’t like him at all.
The admiral slouched further into his chair. ‘You know what I mean, Juvenel.’
‘I do.’ He sat down.
‘If you’re going to be impertinent enough to sit without my offering, I suppose I ought to offer you some wine.’
‘Thank you.’ Juvenel picked up a goblet. Thanks to Fresne’s efforts, it was spotless. He held it out to Danakan. When the admiral poured, the metal jug rattled on the lip of the goblet. Wine slopped over the edge.
‘Throne save us all,’ Danakan said.
‘From a little spilled wine, sir?’ said Juvenel.
‘You really are too much, Juvenel.’
Juvenel sipped the wine and stared into the fire. The dance of the flames was hypnotic.
‘This is good wine,’ he said.
‘I am the bloody admiral, Arran. I should have good wine.’
‘You are.’ Juvenel took another sip. ‘Sir, I am not going to ask permission to speak freely, because I do not think you will allow me to.’
‘It never stopped you before.’ Danakan took a long pull at his drink. He spilled it into his beard, and wiped it away with a shaking hand.
‘Sir, you’re not yourself.’
Danakan sighed. ‘I had hoped you had not noticed.’
‘I noticed. Fresne has too.’
‘Yes, well, what does that little eavesdropper not see? He’s probably outside the doors with his ears pressed to the metal.’ He raised his voice and turned around in his chair. ‘Listening right now!’
‘He probably is,’ Juvenel said.
‘You have the manner of a man who is choosing his next words carefully, Juvenel,’ said Danakan.
‘I am,’ he replied. ‘I am concerned. We are concerned, Fresne and I.’
‘I am touched. I would have thought that you might be eager for an opening, an ambitious young man like you.’
‘Sir, please. You are a hero of the Imperium. You are a hero to everyone in this fleet. The Iron Master, that’s what they call you. We need you. What with everything that has happened, the losses, the Rift, the state of the warp. Without you, I fear the fleet will fall apart.’
‘I am touched,’ said Danakan sarcastically. The Dominance shuddered. Danakan blanched.
‘Damn your misery, sir. I need you. What use is this fleet to Lord Dante if its master loses his mind?’
‘So I’m losing my mind now?’
‘Sir, please!’
Danakan rubbed at the bridge of his nose, hard. When he took his hand away he looked at Juvenel properly for the first time. His eyes were red. ‘I hear you. These people, they need me. Once, I wanted to be needed.’ He shuddered. ‘There are screams that pass you by and leave no impression. You survive in service long enough, you see people die.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘I have seen a lot of people die. On my first mission of my first command – it was a little torpedo boat, crew of hundreds, that’s all, very fast, beautiful little thing – but on my first mission, my command deck took a glancing hit. Just shrapnel, but she was a fragile ship. Took out half the ceiling, and all the way down the wall. The oculus popped out like a lens from a dropped monocle. I barely survived. I saw most of my command crew sucked out to their deaths in the void. All I had to show for it was a bit of void burn. Two weeks in the medicae, I was fine.’ He took a shaky drink. ‘The deaths didn’t bother me. The screams didn’t bother me. I was like you, full of the swagger of youth and the desire to serve. They died in service. I lived, and could serve further. All for the Emperor. That was all there was to it. Glorious,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ve seen ships die. I’ve seen worlds die. The death of a world is an abstract to a ship lord. It is a burning orb. You cannot see the inhabitants die. You do not hear them. World death is vectors of attack and bombardment solutions. A ship is more personal, easier to relate to. But the dead, what are they? Floating motes vented into the void. I’ve seen so many people die, Juvenel. I’ve been responsible, but for the longest time I did not care. It had to be done, so it was.’ He drained his goblet and poured himself more. ‘I think it began to change when we burned that aeldari corsair fleet off Desdemona. Such beautiful things, frying in their own fires, and I thought, how like us they are. I’d never thought that before. I think, I think…’
He lapsed into silence, staring into the fire. ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said eventually. ‘The screams don’t matter at all on their own, but they pile up in your soul, higher and higher, until some balance is reached and it tips, and the screams that do not matter become the screams that do matter very, very much. I saw them burn, Juvenel, all of them on the Eternal Blade, before they got me out of there. I was saved. I know I’m the damned admiral and everything, but every night since, I have seen my crew burn again, and I ask myself, why not me? It’s going to happen again, sooner or later.’
He drank the cup dry again. It did not stop his hands shaking.
‘So, flag-lieutenant, you may well need the Iron Master, but I’m afraid he is not here any more.’
Guondrin’s life had become cramped and depressing. As he fought against the storm, his mind returned to comforts lost. A Navigator’s career began meanly, but once proven and out of the lower ranks and the vileness of a containment blister, a Navigator could expect his own manse. A small oasis of civilisation in the joylessness of voidships, replete with the luxuries of home. For the fortunate, there were silks, servants, wine, song, and respect. A Navigator of a capital ship like the Dominance had a palace of surpassing beauty.
That was no longer the case. So many Navigators were required to find a way through the warp now, Guondrin was forced to share his accommodation. Attrition among his people was high. After the Rift opened, the Paternova issued a bull commanding a reduction in attendants in all manses for fear of warp corruption. No dancers, no singers, no fine chefs or major-domos to ease a Navigator’s burden. The Dominance’s navigatorial quarters became squalid for lack of servants.
Guondrin was of high birth, used to the very finest of things. Even so, he had not resented the reduction in circumstances, not at first.
Not any more. Now he was tired to the bone. His warp eye ached. Now he would kill for a good amasec and the skills of a well-trained body slave, but he’d settle for ten minutes alone in a quiet room.
TuMar Ikuo was whispering the same thing to himself over and over again.
‘Paternova, Emperor, Paternova, Emperor, Paternova, Emperor.’
