Soldiers of the Imperium, page 60
So, when she finally opened her eyes to see Lord Prefector Ule seated at the end of her bed, his hollow gaze bearing down on her with something amounting to impatience – and noticed for the first time the presence of his hound’s mind beside her own – she cursed herself once again for thinking she had been awake at any point before this.
‘Lord prefector,’ she mumbled softly, her cracked lips tasting slightly of copper as she ran a desert-dry tongue across them. The starch-rough texture of linen fabric grated at her back except in those places where it was replaced by the sticky, moist warmth of weeping bedsores. As she tried to lift her head, searing pain shot through her neck, muscles straining against some new and unfamiliar weight. Slowly, she lifted a hopelessly thin arm, covered in bruises she had no memory of earning, towards the back of her skull.
Where thick, dark hair had once grown, she now felt only smooth, cool skin alternating with the cold, inhuman sensation of metal cables coursing from the base of her neck along her scalp. Her hand came away streaked with macabre strands of old, rusty blood and fresh serous fluid. She stared at the ancient ecclesiarch before her.
‘Of course,’ the lord prefector replied to her unvocalised question. ‘I will tell you what I can. Although I suspect you’ll find any answers I can offer less than satisfying, for I’m afraid I know little more than you do of precisely the events that brought you to this moment.’
Aerand grunted, and forced herself upright in bed. ‘And of more basic matters?’ she asked, gently touching the augmetics lining her scalp.
‘There I might be more helpful.’ As Ule spoke, another figure entered the small, dimly lit room through a low, curtained door.
The resemblance between the lord prefector and the Adeptus Mechanicus magos was uncanny, both metal-bound masses of articulating limbs. Where the lord prefector’s face lay, however, the Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priest wore a pair of glowing crimson optic bionics and a gruesome vox-enhancer. The inhuman creature shuffled alongside Aerand’s bed in the narrow room, an articulated appendage capped with a third optic bionic reaching out over a shoulder to survey his work as his vice-like upper extremities extended towards the cables lining Aerand’s scalp.
She recoiled at the approaching mechanical limbs before settling under their cool, surprisingly gentle touch. As he worked, the tech-priest muttered beneath his breath in that strange, guttural, mechanical language that Aerand had only heard spill from the mouths of enginseers and servitors on a few uncomfortable occasions.
‘There may be some pain,’ he managed eventually, in a terrible voice reminiscent of grinding metal and gears. Then he grasped a single cable at the back of her scalp and pulled.
There was a wet, gulping sound as the magos ripped the coupling from the base of Aerand’s skull, followed by a terrible, mind-numbing anguish as thousands of individual, hair-thin tendrils tore free from the individual synapses of her brain. Aerand found herself unable to focus enough to form words, or even scream, as the tech-priest tinkered with the wires remaining on her scalp. The copper tendrils of the cable he had removed from her skull dangled from the prehensile grasp of his unnatural tail-like appendage as he worked, dripping blood and fluid across the pale sheet atop her. Then, almost as suddenly as the pain had arrived, the tech-priest completed his strange ritual, and her discomfort faded.
Stepping back, the magos made a strange, recognisably approving sound, and departed the room to the clatter of plasteel.
‘It has been some time since I last sat in this position, but I can assure you that I have never seen one of the gifted find comfort in the placement of their first bridle.’
Ule’s articulated hand fell softly towards the head of the hound beside him – a cowering psyker who bore no resemblance to the figure that had crawled beside him when Aerand had last seen the lord prefector. Amidst the tangle of other raw augmetics, a small, dark box glowed faintly with green and violet light atop the creature’s neck. The hound flinched, then settled beneath the unnervingly fond gesture.
‘I am certain that you do not currently feel grateful for Magos Fenestrus’ administrations, but for now, simply know that without the psychic suppression afforded by the device he provided, I am not certain we would have ever recovered you from the empyrean. Besides, once the pain fades, you may come to find the device’s other enhancements even positive.’
Aerand groaned, the inside of her skull still buzzing slightly with that strange, burning sensation. She would have to trust the lord prefector’s assurances.
‘Questions,’ he stated. ‘I know you have many. I will answer them as best I can.’
‘Very well,’ Aerand replied, shifting in the narrow bed and pushing herself slowly upright on arms that felt impossibly weak. ‘To begin, how long has it been since our last conversation?’
‘The emergence of a new primaris psyker is not a common occurrence, even in the scholastica psykana, adept. Nor has Magos Fenestrus been alone in his work. I have visited this room frequently since you arrived, and done my best to survey your mind on each visit. You have had little to say but moans and prayers.’
‘And how long since the last conversation I remember?’
‘Nearly six solar days,’ the lord prefector replied flatly. ‘One in the rift chamber itself, and another five lying on this gurney. It is no surprise you find yourself substantially weakened. Your strength, I promise, will return with time.’
Aerand grimaced. ‘And what, precisely, did that return cost?’
A flicker of uncertainty crossed the lord prefector’s face. ‘I must admit, I am not entirely certain, and my assessment of your passage is as limited by your memory as your own.
‘You must understand that you are not unique in this, adept. The scholastica has rescued nascent psykers from exposure after far longer, but six days is no short time to be lost in the empyrean. Your training and your strength of will, alongside the God-Emperor’s grace, are the only reason your mind, and soul, remain intact. My priests have scoured your memories to the limits of their power, and the magos has probed your mind with the extent of his arts. We see no lingering taint of the warp within you, and I do not fear that you have been broken or seeded, but the immaterium leaves its marks on all who touch it. I’m afraid that it may be quite some time before we know the full extent of the scars of your tempering.’
As he spoke, a vague memory returned to Aerand, of darkness deep and unimaginable, of a thousand memories, or premonitions of the future. For days she had swum in those mad, darkened currents, among the hungry, grasping shadows and those burnt, bloodied skies.
Slowly, an unbidden urge to move growing within her, Aerand swung her legs over the side of the bed. Taut skin and cramping muscles, unused for the better part of a week, protested the movement, but she found that the physical pain brought a strange clarity to her mind.
For the first time, she noticed the silver staff resting on the foot of her bed. Gently, she reached out and ran her fingers across the intricately wrought aquila mounted atop the weapon, feeling a sudden thrum of movement beneath her skin. Electric. Like touching the warp itself, but tempered by the sensation that its power came from within her, rather than some forbidden, alien font.
‘Ah yes,’ the lord prefector murmured. ‘A second gift for you from the magos, adept. A force staff attuned to the best of his artisans’ abilities. A proper weapon for one such as you.’
Aerand turned the stave in her bony grip, planting its tapered base against the floor. Sweating, she grasped the cool metal and pushed herself to her feet.
‘One final question, lord prefector. When may I leave this place? And where does the God-Emperor will me?’
A glimmer of pride crossed the ancient priest’s countenance as she took a wobbling step towards the door.
‘Tell me, adept. What else do you remember?’
‘No,’ Aerand stammered, surprised to find herself uttering the word.
The lord prefector stared down at her and the hololithic display with the patient sufferance one might show to a particularly dense child. With a flick of his fingers, the glowing display began to spin, a small world taking shape on the pedestal between them. Aerand had scarcely completed the short walk to the lord prefector’s sanctum on her atrophied legs, and now wished that she had not made the journey at all.
‘I am afraid that choice is not yours to make.’
Aerand stared at the small, revolving planet, her memories of the rift chamber suddenly as clear as the glowing orb twisting before her. ‘Your prefectors have seen my memories, lord,’ she whispered. ‘They have laid my mind bare. You know why I cannot go to this place.’
‘And yet, I must send someone.’ Ule halted the hololithic globe and spread his fingers, the map viewer expanding onto a single island of green on a world painted almost entirely blue.
‘Visage. Witchhaven. Pythonissa, on the old High Gothic charts. A middling, unimportant frontier world by all accounts, except the ones that truly matter.
‘There was a time, millennia past, when the tithe of gifted from Pythonissa exceeded that of the rest of its sector combined. For the last millennium since its recolonisation, however, it has defied every attempt at Imperial control. In the last century alone almost a dozen regiments have been squandered attempting to pacify what should be little more than a feral world occupied by primitive familial factions and outmoded animistic heretical beliefs. And yet–’
‘And yet you have seen what lingers there,’ Aerand interrupted.
‘As have you.’
A vivid image of that strange, branching silver artefact rose suddenly to the front of her mind. Its arcane geometries still made her mind spin, not unlike the symbols inscribed on the lord prefector’s chamber door, or the ornate calligraphies tracing what few scraps of his metallic torso were visible beneath the folds of his robe. Yet there was a bitter taste to that particular memory, the faintest echo of the immaterium itself. And behind that, the sensation of a singular intelligence rising from the depths of the warp to swallow her whole.
‘My lord, do not think that I am afraid.’
‘That is precisely what I think,’ Ule replied harshly. ‘But you have every reason to be frightened. Whatever lingers on Visage is not something to trifle with, and yet, trifle we must, adept. To secure Visage and its tithe of gifted would not shift the tide of the great struggle on its own, but it certainly would not damage the effort. And to lose that world at a time when we are so desperate already… Well, you are more than capable of prophesying those consequences yourself.’
Aerand opened her mouth to protest, but Ule cut her off.
‘I see your concerns. I do not need to scry your mind to do so, for they are written plainly across your face.’
The lord prefector’s expression softened slightly as Aerand’s hand went again to the wires on her scalp.
‘I have read your records, adept. I know you had a life before this place. I may not look it, but I am still human enough to know that over the last five years you have clung to memories of that life, and the comrades with whom you shared it. Perhaps, even when things were the darkest, you let yourself dream of someday returning to them, however absurd you knew that fantasy might be. And I am certain, as well, that you were wise enough to know those dreams for the bitter fiction that they were. There are risks to this reunion, adept. Not just for your ego, but for your former soldiers as well.
‘But you have also seen the danger that faces them. You know their strengths and weaknesses better than anyone else. Do not think that I do not realise the pain this will cause you. Do not think I do not realise the risk. And yet…’
‘And yet they already have a primaris psyker, my lord,’ Aerand replied. ‘And Jarrah Kellipso is a far more capable man than me.’
A pained grimace accompanied the lord prefector’s next words. ‘Several days before you entered the rift chamber, Jarrah Kellipso’s regimental commander filed a routine brief with the lord general militant’s retinue, reporting significant progress in the hunt for a powerful psychic artefact on Visage, and making particular note of Kellipso’s efforts on this front. Less than a week later, I received an urgent requisition from the Departmento Munitorum, authorised by the lord general militant’s own hand, for a primaris psyker to be assigned to a vacant billet in the same regiment, with no mention whatsoever of Jarrah Kellipso. Nor has he been named in any subsequent report.
‘Despite a dozen callings and missives, despite the attentions of my most powerful astropaths, there has been no word from Jarrah Kellipso since the day you encountered his mind in the warp.’
‘He warned me,’ Aerand interrupted. ‘He warned me of what awaits on that world.’
‘I heard,’ Ule replied. ‘My prefectors saw. Do not think that his warning was meant solely for you.
‘And yet,’ the ancient psyker continued, fixing her with a piercing, sightless stare, ‘when have old soldiers ever listened to warnings?’
CHAPTER 5
It had begun with a woman, as such things often did. Only not in the way that he would have expected.
He had not been the Colonel then. Only a captain. Not even the captain. The sergeant had still been the sergeant, although only in the company grade. Before years of war stripped them both of enough superiors that they eventually found themselves in command.
They had been planetside for less than a month, but were already learning what life on a world like Visage would be like. Lightning raids into putrid, damp bogs. Shadows at the edges of hasty camps in the night. Non-existent supply lines. Naval assets more mercurial than the weather, which might depart orbit entirely for a season or a year with little more than a few hours’ notice.
And above all of it, the filthy taint of Chaos.
None of these were new challenges to troopers of the Astra Militarum. The Imperial Guard, even regiments from a young world like Dorea, prided themselves on their ability to fight, and win, under precisely such circumstances. What he’d had yet to learn was the human cost.
He had never even learned her name.
Years later he thought he might have found a pict of her in a discarded Adeptus Administratum filebook. If so, then she had been a minor clerk in the employ of the Imperium bureaucracy once – a lavish opportunity for an uneducated commoner on a world without so much as a schola. That said, the records had been water-stained badly enough, and his only glimpse of the woman so entirely fleeting, that it might have been any one of a hundred other dead he had seen that day.
Throne be true, it wasn’t the woman that mattered, it was the thing bundled in rags crying in her arms.
They couldn’t just leave the girl.
He’d had children, once, in another life. Before Dorea, and the Emperor, and the endless void. So had the sergeant. So had half the troopers in the 19th Regiment. And for a time, it had felt like they’d gained those lives again.
The killing didn’t stop. The killing never stopped. That was the lot of a soldier, and he did not begrudge it. But it had a purpose once again. A reason for the violence. A small, growing light full of wonder and hope.
Until the Emperor took that from them, too.
‘What?’ the Colonel managed eventually, stripped from the bitter memory by a polite cough from Sergeant Gross.
‘There’s a woman,’ the sergeant repeated. ‘A new arrival for the Imperial detachment, who seems to fit the description of a psyker lord. Just a few glimpses from a dockhand friendly to the cause, but enough that I’d stake blood on it. Tall, thin. Cadian herself based on the eyes. A robe, a staff. All the usual accoutrements. And there’s an anxious soldier at her back with a bolt pistol that he looks only too ready to fire.’
‘Very well,’ he grunted.
It had begun with a woman. It would end with one, too.
Glavia Aerand stepped out of the Arvus lighter and into a hanging drizzle. A thin, white haze obscured her first vision of Visage, already dampening the folds of her thick robes and beading like sweat against the surface of her skin. If not for the weapon pressed into the small of her back, she might have turned around.
‘Move,’ called the stretched and nervous voice of the thin, prim adjudicant tasked with delivering her planetside. The young man wore an immaculately pressed jacket of Bulean wool that shouted wealth and impracticality to anyone with eyes. That coupled with a clear lack of the experience or composure usually required for the position he held spoke of family connections Aerand could hardly imagine.
She had not bothered to learn the man’s name, although he would have been an easy enough target. His mind lay bare beneath only the thinnest mental shields, but the psychic scent of thousands of unsanctioned, untrained psykers drifted from him as strongly as his cloying perfume.
Six months aboard one of the accursed Black Ships that traversed the galaxy in endless, dour cycles, gathering the warp sensitive and depositing them on the scholastica psykana’s doorstep. Six months in the presence of thousands of undisciplined souls, screaming out into the empyrean in a single, massed voice. One trip on a Black Ship was enough to madden many psykers. She had never dreamed she would be forced to take a second, and Throne forbid she ever let herself take a third.
‘I said move, witch,’ the adjudicant called again, pressing her forward with the barrel of his bolt pistol. She obliged, if only to have the satisfaction of seeing the man utterly ruin his garment.
She had dealt with rain before. She could deal with rain. On worlds like Ourea and Flak she had practically lived in it. Within an instant, however, she knew this would be worse.
