Soldiers of the Imperium, page 70
For the first time since arriving on Visage, she could breathe enough to notice that space. A space that had never existed when they were captain and company sergeant together.
Now, more than ever, she longed for the presence of another gifted. One she could trust. One like the man she had been sent to find, or avenge.
‘Corwyn,’ she called after him as he turned. ‘Lord Kellipso. Did the company treat him the same way?’
‘Who?’ Corwyn asked.
‘Jarrah Kellipso,’ she repeated. The sergeant’s ears must have been ringing after the din of las-fire and autoweapons.
Olevier Corwyn stared at her blankly, his face falling utterly expressionless. He recovered a moment later, his demeanour replaced by one of confusion.
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that name.’
CHAPTER 8
A strange nostalgia washed over the Colonel at the sight of Providence’s walls. Strange to think that he had once commanded the guns lining them and the soldiers sheltered behind them. Even now, years later, he recognised each footing and segment of foundation and could picture the convoluted, twisting streets within.
All the easier to raze the city entirely, then.
‘You must understand,’ he said softly to the prisoner beside him. ‘I bear no ill will towards you or your comrades as individuals. Only to the idea that you, as a whole, represent.’
In the mud beside his feet, a Cadian trooper squirmed.
The young man, wearing a simple private’s rank insignia and scarcely old enough to shave, groaned slightly as the Colonel set a mud-caked boot atop his broken ribs. He leaned forward with an unfortunate crack.
‘Quiet,’ Sergeant Gross grumbled at the sudden scream.
The trooper caught his breath in shallow gasps and finally managed to give force to the words he had been mouthing for the last minute.
‘Go to hell,’ he muttered. ‘The Emperor protects.’
The sergeant raised the butt of his lasgun, but the Colonel held up a patient hand. He set his foot back into the shallow puddle of sea water that gathered over the small rise like an oil slick.
‘I thought that once, myself, too, but I learned. The Emperor did a poor job protecting the rest of your squad.’ The Colonel knelt down and grabbed the trooper by the collar, turning his body so he had no option but to stare into the faces of the eight dead men and women lining the small rise beside him. ‘He did a poor job protecting your home world, too.’
Behind him, the crone paced like a caged animal, keeping her distance from the Colonel and his last living prisoner. He’d allowed her the first opportunity to crack the captured squad of Cadians, but after she’d driven two mad with little additional information acquired he had turned to more conventional means. Leave the witch her voices and visions and torments, he needed little more than a boot to extract information.
At the sight of her, the man in the dirt raised a battered arm in a pitiful attempt to make the sign of the aquila.
‘Don’t mind her,’ the Colonel ordered. ‘Her petty gods care no more about you than your Emperor does. Now, show me the access chit for the service corridors.’
This was the problem with gods, whether dark or light. The Colonel did not deny their existence, only their interest in the fleeting, futile striving of their servants. Blood for the Blood God. Change for Tzeentch. But how many more martyrs lay at the feet of the God-Emperor of Mankind, however pure His motives?
Let them wage their petty wars in heaven. Let crusaders, black or light, throw their lives away on behalf of whatever deity or power they chose. Neither great movements nor their deities gave a single thought to the humans dying in agony to sustain them.
So let the gods grapple. Let them tear each other piece from piece. And perhaps in the end, there would finally be space for humans to exist in peace.
‘The Emperor…’ the man coughed, doubling over. ‘The Emperor protects.’
Throne above. He had believed such nonsense once, too, but he’d had the good sense to learn his lessons. The Colonel froze as he watched the young man reach quickly into his pocket and shove a small, silver fleck between his teeth.
Before he could bring them together and shatter the device, a silver blade erupted from his throat. Sergeant Gross sighed, pulling his sword from the Cadian’s neck and bending down to slip the bloody chit from the man’s mouth as he coughed up red sputum. He dropped the dripping tech into the Colonel’s hand.
‘We will see if He does, I suppose, after all.’
Aerand shook like a fresh Whiteshield before battle, unable to still unsteady limbs and her swimming vision, as she pulled a small, inconspicuous package from her voidlocker. The entire container – hardly large enough to store her pair of Mars-pattern command pistols, a light breastplate of flak armour, and a few extra garments – was all she had been allowed to carry aboard the Emperor’s Grace. But among those scant and spartan belongings, the small black package now resting in her hand was by far the most powerful and the most dangerous.
Gently, she untied the thin silver cord around the bundle and unwrapped its thick, black leather casing, the soft white glow of liquid crystal suddenly suffusing the tiny room. Already, a coolness washed over her, the temperature of the air dropping several degrees. Careful not to touch the deck itself, she placed the cards of the Emperor’s Tarot on the dirt floor before her.
‘Steady now,’ she whispered to herself, as doubts began to ambush her. The Emperor rewarded courage, not cowardice.
A casting of the Tarot was a perilous affair even under ideal circumstances, with more opportunities for failure than success. In the most benign missteps, the cards might simply fall treacherously, revealing a clouded vision of the future that left their reader more lost than before they’d been laid. In the worst, the invocation of such potent psionic forces could draw any number of unwanted entities from the warp. For this reason, in the scholastica psykana the Tarot was rarely cast by fewer than three psykers, and rare still less than two. And yet, she found herself desperate enough to try alone.
‘Besieged without and within.’ So began a prayer she’d once heard on the lips of a nameless Cadian watchman. The man had died before he’d had a chance to finish it.
An unknown force surrounded Visage. An unholy alliance of perverse and potent empyreal powers strong enough to raise echoes of the dead and several regiments’ strength of traitor militias, well trained enough to stand toe to toe with Cadian shock troopers and not immediately crumble. Within those ranks waited dozens, if not hundreds, of psykers, and Jarrah Kellipso – her mentor and the only other gifted on this world loyal to the God-Emperor – was dead, or worse. And somehow, inexplicably, no soldier of the 900th Cadian Regiment seemed to even remember that the man had ever existed.
The look of utter confusion across Sergeant Corwyn’s face hung in her mind like a poor piece of painted art. The pained juxtaposition of a mind struggling against itself would have been obvious to anyone with eyes. Aerand had stood beside Olevier Corwyn the first time she had met the primaris psyker Jarrah Kellipso, and somewhere within the folds of his brain, the man harboured years of memories of the psyker lord. Yet another, more powerful compulsion held those memories from his conscious mind. Even more worrisome, of the dozen other troopers she’d interrogated since, even under the subtle influence of her will, every one showed the same, unnatural division.
Aerand’s own mind felt far too feeble to even begin teasing apart that deeper mystery, yet she knew that sleep would not possibly come until she had at least started down that treacherous path. Slowly, she crossed her aching, cramped legs, and forced her mind into the First Meditation.
‘I turn my ears, O God-Emperor, towards the sound of your silence. That I may recognise your voice when it speaks.’
Silence.
Not quite, unfortunately.
After her display outside Providence’s gates, she’d had no trouble finding isolation from the remainder of the 900th Regiment. The only thing that travelled faster than a las-round was a war story, and already whispers of her exploits had circled wide enough to reach back to her. If the soldiers of the 900th had been wary of her before, most were now utterly terrified at even the sight of her.
And yet, the small hovel she had taken for her quarters provided precious little quiet.
Outside the flimsy, corrugated steel door, the sound of artillery and mortars rang out like a drumbeat. Vyse had assured her that no attack was imminent, yet the company of Basilisks attached to the 900th was not about to take any chances. Even now, the mist-strewn wastes around Providence boiled with the surging impacts of high-explosive and incendiary shells.
Despite the constant intrusion, Aerand found the booming rhythm almost soothing. Slowly, she synched her breathing with the rise and fall of the shells, until their sound began to fade from her mind. In its place, for the first time since arriving on this planet, the subtle hint of a familiar chorus rose in her ears.
‘I turn my eyes, O God-Emperor, towards the sight of your servant, that I may see my failings and judge myself true.’
The dark, multicoloured fabric of the empyrean rolled out around her, swallowing the dim glow of her sleeping room. Outside the thin walls, souls swam like sparks from a fire, troopers and civilians milling about, making preparations for the violence to come. In the centre of that mess, a single soul glowed like a beacon, and Aerand drew her attention around herself like a mirror.
The primaris psyker had not slept in over thirty hours. She had not eaten in that time, and had scarcely drunk a sip. Her body protested with every minor movement, a dull ache suffusing all of her limbs. Sharp discomfort emanated from a dozen bruises along her shins and knees, and the skin at her wrists and ankles protested where corpsewood roots had left it lacerated. A deep gash ran along the length of her right ankle, from her desperate attempt to split those tendrils with her combat blade. With her attention fully turned to the wound, she felt the slow ooze of blood from the capillaries beneath her skin, and the faint tug of flesh already beginning to reknit.
She was exhausted. She was desperately hungry and thirsty. She was falling apart both physically and mentally.
In short, she was already only inches from the warp.
Finally, content that she was as prepared for this moment as she could be, she turned her attention to a second, brighter light.
‘I turn my soul, O God-Emperor, towards the light of your grace, that I may surrender before it and burn just as brightly.’
At the centre of Providence, where Javax Cathedral towered above the city, a silver-white glow dominated the immaterium. It was not uncommon, she knew, for the Astronomican’s psionic light to be more easily sensed near places of faith. Despite that knowledge, she found herself surprised at the strength of the beacon after so long in those mists, unable to sense its signal at all. It blazed clear and true in her mind now.
Her ears full of the Astronomican’s hymn, and its light bathing her like evening sun, Aerand turned her attention to the cards on the floor.
Seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal lorelei glowed like souls of their own in the immaterium.
Powerful enough to form the basis of force weapons and psychic hoods, lorelei was also subtle enough to be cast into paper-thin sheets. It was one way to produce a copy of the Emperor’s Tarot, one that had the potential for stronger readings but also invited more risk. The deck had been presented to Aerand as Ule’s parting gift. Yet the substance, psionically active as it was, could respond to any other psychic force, as well. Even to touch the deck physically risked corrupting a casting.
‘Let me see true,’ Aerand whispered, the diviner’s simplest and most honest prayer. With a flick of her finger, the first card rose from the deck and came to rest on the dusty floor.
The Soldier, upright. The first of her cardinals. The pre-eminent figure in the casting to come. Not an unexpected archetype to appear in the midst of a warzone. In a city literally laid to siege.
A stoic figure knelt amid a field of corpses, bloodied battle armour draped across his frame. The card was painfully vague, and while the silhouetted warrior held something in his hands, she could not make out the weapon’s specific design, nor any other features of the soldier who bore it.
Such an obscured cardinal could portend many things. Multiple individuals competing without their knowledge for a role within diverse fates to come. An intentional concealment of identity on the part of the card-bearer or another force acting on his or her behalf. Or simply an exhausted diviner who should not have attempted such a ritual alone.
In all cases the Soldier foretold war and blood, but neither of these were revelations for a primaris psyker of the Astra Militarum. Slowly she placed the next card beside it.
The High Priest. Inverted. A more interesting character.
A breath of chilled air filled Aerand’s lungs as she inspected the casting, the first hints of hoar frost forming in the dirt around the cards. Upright, the High Priest signified nothing more than the presence of the Ecclesiarchy, and the Emperor’s Church as a player in this muddled game. Inverted, however, the card told of obscene cults or corrupted parishioners, or perhaps a confessor who held secrets of his own.
Aerand could not help but recall the look of unease she’d received from Javard Libertinum as she’d passed him on her way through the Sun Gate. As if he were less than happy to see her alive. The man robed in crimson on the card before her bore an unmistakable resemblance to the confessor, and even from this distance, she caught the faint hint of a psionic ripple in the air around the ecclesiarch’s head.
A nervous energy collected in her, and she found herself turning the third card, unbidden.
The Witch. In opposition to the Soldier. A sorcerer? A primaris psyker? Aerand herself? Jarrah Kellipso? The cards made no distinction between such subtleties.
Aerand’s breath caught as she laid the card flat. A face twisted in agony adorned the liquid crystal wafer before her, lined with pain and age, with the sharp glow of warp lightning around it. Grey eyes bored out of the crystal at her, and she could practically hear Jarrah Kellipso’s voice in her mind.
Death and hunger and enough bitter regret to drown in. A clear enough warning, and one she’d chosen to ignore.
Her heart racing, Aerand scrambled to draw the next card.
The final of her four cardinals fell to the dirt with an unnatural weight, as if the character had sped its own arrival on the field. The flavour of blood filled Aerand’s mouth, and her skin came to life with the raw energy of the empyrean. From around the card, frigid air erupted, crystallising beads of moisture on the damp floor and walls, Aerand’s own breaths falling suddenly in rapid clouds.
The Beast. Upright. Major arcana. The final of her cardinals, and therefore the position which flavoured each of the others in this particular casting.
Despite the fact that she knew each card in her deck to be precisely the same dimensions as the others, that single card suddenly loomed larger than the other three on the field. A dark, twisted monstrosity seemed to swallow the entire lorelei wafer, faint hints of the iridescent, unbridled warp filling what little open space it left on the card. Even just glancing at its form, Aerand found her mind swimming, a terrible pressure behind her eyes and a burning at the base of her neck.
Whatever blinded artisan had crafted the psionic images on this deck, the psyker had seen true enough to capture this form perfectly. Aerand shivered as memories of her time in the unshielded warp returned to her, threatening to swallow her in those waters again. Somehow, that terrible shadow rising beneath her had found its way to her again in the mists just outside these walls.
A casting was always a dangerous affair, and this one had clearly gone on long enough. Deep below her, she felt the empyrean swirl.
The Soldier in opposition to the Witch. The High Priest, inverted, in opposition to the Beast. No clear vision of either the present or the future, and too many possible alignments for any to ring true. Did the Soldier and High Priest conspire together against the Witch? Did the Witch stand opposed to the Beast or beside it? A darker thought filled her mind at the memory of Jarrah Kellipso. Had all three – the Soldier, the High Priest, the Beast – conspired together to effect his demise?
With a sigh, Aerand lifted her palm from her knee, but found that none of the tarot on the field moved with it. She swallowed as a flurry of cards erupted from the deck, unbidden.
The Sword falling atop the Soldier, spinning slowly without finding a steady position. A warrior assailed on all sides, unsure where to direct his violence.
The Candle beneath the High Priest, flame reaching out beyond the borders of the liquid crystal to lick the edges of the card above it. Illumination. Supplication. Purifying fire.
The Blind Seer, between the Witch and the Beast. Linking the two cards, or standing between them?
Vision swimming, Aerand watched another card rise from the deck, hovering just above the centre of the field. At the back of her mind, the song of the Astronomican warred with a choir of whispering voices she had no desire to entertain. Her breath fell in thick white gouts, as ice hardened along the walls of her small, austere shelter, and the field before her wobbled in front of her eyes. The final card of the casting slammed into the dirt with enough force to scatter the others. A sudden will assailed her from the card itself. The will to turn over. The will to be seen.
Aye, she was a Blind Seer, indeed, and an utter fool. This casting had gone on long enough, and any tarot card with such a desire to be seen was not a portent that could be easily trusted. Before the card could reveal itself, Aerand slammed her hand atop it, the sudden physical connection of her skin scattering the psionic energy swirling around the deck.
