Throneworld Read online

  Bohemond’s gaze hardened. ‘Do you accuse me of hypo­crisy, Koorland?’

  ‘I ask you to clarify your priorities, that is all. If there is an accusation of hypocrisy, it comes from within your own heart, and not from my lips.’ Koorland leaned forward. ‘We cannot always pursue the desires of our hearts, righteous as they might be.’ He paused. ‘You hold your Eternal Crusader as dearly as your oaths?’

  ‘Absolutely. Both ship and oaths were the gift of Dorn.’

  ‘But this, the Abhorrence that serves as your flagship while Sigismund’s craft repairs, is it a good ship?’

  Bohemond’s eye narrowed. ‘It is a fine ship, a righteous tool of the Imperium.’

  ‘So you see, son of my father, the power of choice is not always ours to wield.’ Koorland bladed his right hand and brought it down in a slow chop to point at Bohemond. ‘At the gathering of the Last Wall at last watch today, I will command that we strike for Terra. And you will not demur, lord High Marshal, but heartily concur.’

  Koorland turned on his heel and left before Bohemond could respond. Both hearts pounded hard in his chest, the secondary activated by stress levels he had felt at no other time outside conflict. Nevertheless, he permitted himself a smile.

  The Black Templars would sail for Terra, or Bohemond was worth none of his regard at all.

  Two

  The Palace of the God-Emperor

  Far from the gates leading to eldar lands, the children of Isha bent their efforts to their race’s salvation. The non-matter that made up the fabric of the tunnel was dim, sleeping. A minor branching to a nowhere world, none had trodden this path for many centuries, and it slumbered. The organic convolutions of the tunnel were barely wide enough to accommodate the party and their transport. It tapered away to nothing not far ahead, truncated by unnatural forces. A waysinger choir chanted interweaving melodies under the watchful gaze of Farseer Eldrad Ulthran, most ancient of his kind. Sorrow as thick as poison fog wreathed them all. To force an opening here spelled death to the eldar waysingers, and only a handful of their choir remained alive.

  Shadowseer Lhaerial Rey waited with five more of Cegorach’s own for egress. The song rose and fell, become more complicated with every passing hundredth. The way remained shut. Dressed in their motley, the Harlequins made a play of lounging and preening as their kin expended their life force, a performance that celebrated through mockery the sacrifices of the others.

  Though they seemed indolent, any who had seen the warrior dancers fight knew they could be up and moving, weapons in hands, in the blink of an eye. The other eldar – those on the path of mourning and service sent to bring the dying waysingers home, the warlock and the Dire Avengers sent to guard them – regarded the Harlequins with suspicion. Only the Dire Avengers showed no fear of them, but then they showed nothing at all.

  The song of the waysingers faltered as another of their number collapsed, his soul fleeing into his waystone.

  ‘Sing your song!’ urged Eldrad Ulthran. He set his staff and bowed his ornate helm. The gems studding his wargear glowed with power as he poured more of his own might into the waysingers.

  A gleaming slit ran down the side of the changeless stuff of the webway.

  ‘Your song is one of power and beauty. Success is within our grasp! Your sacrifice will be remembered for a thousand cycles,’ said Ulthran. ‘A final effort, brothers and sisters – your deaths bind a favourable skein for the fate of Ulthwé! Sing, and usher in the rebirth of our race!’

  With a melodic shout, the last of the waysingers fell dead, her dying breath sung out to open the path. Twenty of them had paid with their lives so that Lhaerial Rey could do what she must do, and their corpses littered the webway. Those sent to watch over them radiated sorrow. Lhaerial Rey did not grieve. One day Cegorach would free them all from death.

  The webway parted to reveal a dark and soulless place beyond.

  Ulthran approached the shadowseer. Lhaerial leapt to her feet, performing an elaborate bow.

  ‘Take this token, given to me fifteen hundred cycles ago,’ said Ulthran. He held out a large, finely carved tooth hanging from a chain. ‘It will convince the mon-keigh of your deadly sincerity.’ Lhaerial Rey took the tooth and spoke her gratitude with a gesture. Ulthran pointed his staff at the portal. ‘Go! Go now! The door is open, but will not remain so for long.’

  The webway spur convulsed in sudden peristalsis. The grav-barge that had borne the party there rocked, disturbed by shifts in the physics of that in-between realm. The attention of the Great Enemy pressed down upon the walls, whispering her seductive call to the annihilation of self that every eldar felt. The webway was damaged here, and perilous.

  Lhaerial Rey’s troupe tensed. No other but a Harlequin could see it, the micro-shifts in stance and muscle.

  The doorway peeled itself back, just wide enough to admit a single eldar at a time.

  ‘We dance,’ said Lhaerial Rey.

  In a bright flurry of shattering silhouettes, the Troupe of Joyful Tears departed the webway.

  The hall on the far side of the portal was of lifeless stone, part-panelled in wood killed a thousand light years away and brought in slow-drying agony across the stars. This world was as dead as its ruler. The stink of humanity lay thick upon it, the statues near the ceiling coated in dust, the shed skin cells of people five hundred cycles gone. The psychic effect was a hideous weight, thousands of years of human suffering pressing in on Lhaerial’s sensitive mind, and that was the least of it. Crushing the sensation of the dead of the Earth was the titanic presence of the Corpse Emperor.

  Such power made Lhaerial’s mind reel, and for a moment her contempt for the creatures of Terra wavered. The mind of the Emperor was a mountain in the surging madness of the Othersea, blinding in its brilliance. The Great Powers circled this place like razorshark waiting out the death throes of a void-whale. That terrible presence held them back, and all His little servants were ignorant of it! Unease gripped her, that she would be noticed by the Dark Gods or their defier, and the fragile flame of her being snuffed out.

  The feeling passed. The regard of the things of the Other­sea was ossified, so long had they fixed their gaze on the Earth. The Emperor did not shift His regard. His attention was elsewhere, upon the blinding pyre of souls, navigation beacon of the mon-keigh. She had no indication she was seen. There was little relief in that. She had laughed in the face of She Who Thirsts, but the Corpse Emperor filled her with a sense of dread.

  Few among the eldar could stand to be in such a place. To the left and right, she saw her fellows go through the same stumble and recovery, their sensitive minds disturbed. When the dance resumed, their steps were heavier than before.

  The troupe ran through the abandoned hall, their light tread leaving no trace in the dust. They were spears of light arrowing through the dark, outshining the dim lanterns set into the vaulting overhead. Carved saints, comical in their anguish and pomposity, loomed out of the dark. They came to a heavy iron door rusted as red as blood. Gehennelith somersaulted, power sword slashing down. His blow delivered, he leapt aside as the sisters Tueneniar and Linead concluded the portal’s shattering with their shuriken pistols.

  Lhaerial Rey was through first, her outline a shimmering cloud of diamonds. Gehennelith, Tueneniar, Linead, Barinamean came after, and lastly the death jester Bho, his dathedi spreading a cloud of ebon shards as confusing as a flurry of bats. Bho had his own reasons for coming, unknown to her. Whatever they were, she was glad of his presence.

  A corridor stretched away, as dim and sepulchral as the hall they had left. A dead planet for a race that had doomed itself. Blue skies and seas, continent-spanning forests and millions of years of natural glory unsullied by crude humanity cried out to be remembered. It sickened her heart, she who had trod the nightmare ground of the Crone Worlds, who thought herself beyond such feeling. If Eldrad Ulthran himself had not requeste
d her aid, she would never have set foot here.

  Everywhere there was only silence, echoing avenues and empty rooms brimming with the self-importance of this race, so arrogant they had paved over the ground that fed them, uprooted the trees that nourished them and boiled away the seas that birthed them. Their crimes were lesser in scale than those of her own ancestors, perhaps, but their folly was worse for its crudeness. There was a majesty in the fall of the eldar, a glorious dance a million cycles in the making. Mankind was a moron chopping at the branch it stood upon. Black-hearted, close-minded, feeble-bodied. Humanity did not deserve to live. She danced out her hatred upon the flagstones as she ran.

  Ulthran had chosen their insertion point well. The deaths of the waysingers bought them a stealthy entrance; these halls had been deserted for some time. The passing of their feet was as gentle as the pattering of rain on Terra’s extinct forests. The few maintenance drones they saw, ghoulishly fashioned from the skulls of human dead, they shot down.

  It could not last. They burst through a creaking set of doors into a hall that ran for several hundred lengths. High desks marched up both sides in precipitous tiers, hundreds of shelves rearing up over those. More dead wood lit by feeble lights of soulless electricity. The rough scent of humanity was strong there. The place was in disarray, sheets of paper and vellum and plasticised hydrocarbons scattered all about.

  They saw their first humans. Pallid things, lumpenly ugly even by the woefully low standards of the race. Several dozen cowered together beneath the desk tiers. Their dull, animal eyes were fixed on the dirty plex-glass of the ceiling a hundred lengths overhead. They did not see the Harlequins until they were practically past them, a kaleidoscopic zephyr that stirred their scattered papers.

  Whole family groupings hid together. They had never seen the sun, Lhaerial could sense it. One of their young let out a mewling cry. Lhaerial’s domino-masked face whipped round, looking the human child full in the face. She raised her pistol, but her mind balked at activating it. The girl’s expression was suffused with a terrified wonder. Her eyes glistened at the beauty she saw. Lhaerial vaulted over a fallen lectern, and put her pistol up.

  The Harlequins were already gone by the time the scribes began shouting. An alarm bell tolled out shortly after.

  Rune signifiers shone on the map projected into Lhae­rial’s mind by her wargear. They were closing on their destination, at the very edge of the administrative hives. Six thousand lengths or more to their target.

  They emerged at speed into a metal cavern. Under steel skies a vast, decrepit parkland opened up, dotted with huge mansions, the fiefs of petitioner-barons and pensioned scrivener overseers. Light pipes directed weak sunlight into the park. Once it had been a lush place, but many of the trees were dead, skeletal things stark white in the gloom. Scraggly weeds dominated the few patches of day.

  Through dirty-mouthed tunnels, ill-disciplined groups of soldiers in black streamed to oppose the Harlequins.

  Gehennelith flipped effortlessly over streaking las-bolts, felling several of the humans with shots of pinpoint accuracy: one disc, one kill.

  ‘Dance their deaths and let us be on,’ ordered Lhaerial. ‘They are weak, but they are many, and we have stirred their ire.’

  Truly she spoke, for already Tueneniar had become separated from her troupe mates. Bho’s shuriken cannon wailed as it spat out its deadly gifts. Men ran in terror as the shrieker cannon’s mutagens caused their fellows to explode.

  Make your own way, little dancer. Distract them so that I may complete our task. We shall meet again,+ communicated Lhaerial. +In Cegorach’s circle, if not in the flesh.+

  Tueneniar sent her assent. She vaulted over the heads of her foes and onto the lowest balcony of a hanging garden that stretched most of the way to the glassed-out sky. In moments she was gone.

  ‘Shadowseer!’ said Linead. ‘We must all diverge, draw them away, perform alone for our audience and draw their attention away from you.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Lhaerial landed softly in the midst of a group of men. Five artful strokes of her sword slew them all. They fell away together, dead before they hit the torn grass. Las-fire converged on her position, but she was already away, running tirelessly towards her target. ‘Break the circle, travel your solitary skeins, my faithful. I shall see you before the Golden Throne of the mon-keigh Emperor, if that is what Morai-Heg has woven.’

  Klaxons clamoured. Linead tossed a grenade through an ornate window. An explosion shook the mansion, spreading fire into its gardens. Lucifer Blacks poured into the area.

  Lhaerial sprinted for the end of the park. A large block of men had taken up station there. They were forming lines, hoping to bring her down with massed volleys. A few took opportunistic shots as they organised themselves, but she effortlessly curved around them. Leaping and somersaulting, she soared high over the first ranks before they could give ordered fire. Hallucinogen grenades popped out of the fluted launcher on her back, bursting into gas clouds of scintillating colours among the humans. Their weak minds were instantly affected. She bent the hallucinations they experienced into illusions of awful nightmare, and they ran weeping before her.

  Then she was away, and her fellows too, scattering like leaves in the wind, leaving the Lucifer Blacks flailing and disorganised. They trod solitary paths, save Bho, who followed her. As always he never spoke his mind, simply acted. Once again, she was glad of his presence.

  Seven hundredths of a cycle later, an explosion rolled out down the endless tunnels and ways of the Imperial Palace, their planned diversion. She smiled behind the mirror bowl of her mask. Everything was going to plan.

  Three

  Krule’s dance

  The Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis was in pandemonium at the explosions in the Palace, moments after the departure of the ork ambassador. Fearing a new offensive against them, the nerve of the great and good of the Imperium broke. Prefectii and consularies wrestled with menials and aides as the exits clogged with human bodies. They scrambled over each other, trampling their fellows in their rush to escape.

  Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, grabbed Mercado and shook him.

  ‘Where are the eldar?’ demanded Vangorich.

  Mercado looked at him dumbly. ‘The Viridarium Nobiles, five levels down.’

  ‘That’s only five kilometres from the Sanctum Imperialis.’

  Mercado nodded. His eyes were still wide, his fingers limp around his vox-horn. Vangorich came close to killing the captain of the Lucifer Blacks there and then.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Reports are confused–’

  ‘How many?’ spat Vangorich through gritted teeth.

  ‘A handful, seven or eight. Brightly coloured.’ The man was rallying himself. ‘I’ll direct all my men to the defence of the Throne Room, and inform Captain-General Beyreuth.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s well aware of this breach,’ said Vangorich. ‘Send your men, but they’ll be too late.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ called Mercado as Vangorich shoved his way through the crowd.

  ‘To deal with this myself.’ He lifted his sleeve to his mouth and spoke into the vox-bead hidden in a button there. ‘Krule, I need you. Now.’ He changed channels. ‘Veritus, if you can hear me, meet me at the Sanctum.’ No reply was forthcoming.

  Vangorich headed for the ablutorials. Near the exits from the main chamber the press of the crowd was slackening as the cream of the Terran adepta flailed at each other in their panic to escape. At the centre the crush grew as men and women shoved their way down from the stacked ranks of seats. The Twelve had already gone from the High Table, whisked away by their bodyguards. At least, thought Vangorich, the Lucifer Blacks can do something correctly.

  He wove his way through the crowd with smooth and occasionally violent efficiency, his habitual insouciant amble cast away in favour of a preda
tor’s fluid movement. Many recognised him and did their best to get out of his way. Where they did not, he helped them along with fists and sharp elbows. By a wash fountain he depressed an insignificant cherub’s elbow. A hidden door slid open. Vangorich slipped into the tunnel it revealed. He hurried along its dark length, emerging into dim sunlight high on the south wall of the Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis.

  He hurried groundwards through a network of concealed maintenance ladders and catwalks. Overhead the ork moon hung pale in the washed-out sky. He glanced at it periodically. No activity there, for the moment. Perhaps the ork ambassador had not yet returned. What the result of his embassy would be was anyone’s guess. Events were getting ahead of Vangorich.

  Still, he thought. One thing at a time.

  At the bottom, Krule awaited him in the groundcar of a rich man. The blood of the prior owner was still wet on the dashboard.

  ‘We need to get to the Sanctum,’ he said.

  ‘The roads are blocked,’ said Krule, getting out of the car. ‘I know a way. We need to take the high-lines.’ He pointed to a transport hub some hundred yards away. Pods rolled automatically into the station from their wire tracks as calmly as if this were any other day.

  They ran through the crowds spilling from the Grand Chamber into the plaza, and down onto the Daylight Way. The transit terminus sat in the shadow of the high wall. People bunched around the terminus, fighting to get onto its boarding platforms. Krule battered his way through, Vangorich behind him. They hurled the people clambering into a waiting pod aside. The crowd recoiled, then surged back towards the open door, until Krule caved in the face of the lead man with a deadly punch. The crowd shrank back again, and Krule slammed the door shut.

  Vangorich activated the pod with his signum, and it rose rapidly on creaking cables, leaving the boiling crowds below.