The Armour of Fate Read online

  ‘You will not need your codes. The message is not for Cawl,’ said Guilliman. ‘It is for another.’

  Guilliman’s Overlord gunship set down upon a plain furred with fantastical, natural sculptures of frost. A cliff of ice, blue with age, soared steeply in front of the landing ground.

  The Overlord gushed steam in prodigious amounts from its temperature regulators, the deep cold of the planet straining the machine’s thermal tolerances. The Overlord dwarfed the Thunderhawks escorting it with its broad twin hulls, but the ice wall was bigger than them all, an implacable mass of frozen atmosphere unaffected by the clouds of vapour billowing up around the ships. The ground emitted curls of gas melted by the heat the ships brought to the frigid world, but it was a brief warming. As the gas rolled upwards, it was already freezing, and it got no further than a few score yards before freezing out into fat flakes of carbon snow and falling back down again through the thin air. Metal clicked with rapid contraction. Within moments, frost ran spider-quick over freezing hulls. By the time the first boarding ramps were lowered, the gunships were growing beards of ice.

  Captain Sicarius and six of the Victrix Guard emerged first: three Primaris Space Marines in modestly decorated armour, and three of the older sort, whose highly ornamented plate proclaimed them as veterans of centuried experience. Their boots crunched on the untrodden plain. Gold trim glinted under the light of the naked void. There was not enough of an atmospheric envelope to obscure the cosmos from the unnamed world, and the light of its distant sun barely competed with the stars. Black was the colour of the sky at morning, noon and night.

  More Primaris Space Marines emerged from their gunships. They wore a variety of liveries, their badges crossed by a pale grey chevron, but they worked together in close-knit teams. They formed a wide perimeter around the ships, dark silhouettes upon the icy white. Wing- and hull-mounted heavy weapons rotated to cover every direction over the plain and the base of the cliff.

  Sicarius made his checks. He took his time, waiting for void-scry and surface auspex soundings to be performed several times. Only when he was satisfied that the area was devoid of anything but ice did he open up his vox channel to the Imperial Regent and pronounce his verdict.

  ‘The landing zone is clear,’ he said.

  Roboute Guilliman disembarked from the Overlord.

  ‘I can find no foes, my lord,’ said Sicarius, ‘but there is nothing here at all, only rock and frozen air. What did you expect to find?’

  ‘What I seek is here,’ said Guilliman. ‘A meeting place made known to me by an old friend long ago.’ He looked up at the cliff and ran his gaze across it. He raised the Hand of Dominion and pointed a single huge mechanical digit. ‘It is there.’

  Sicarius called over his auspex specialist.

  ‘You will find nothing,’ said Guilliman. ‘There is a door buried in the ice. Bring up melta devices and burn your way in.’ He strode along the foot of the cliff. It was peculiarly regular, the ripples in its surface almost too well formed to be natural. There were no boulders at its foot. The plain stopped, and it rose up, as if the land been neatly folded. As the primarch passed the last of the sentries, a group of them broke free from the circle and fell in with him, the rest adjusting their positions so their perimeter was again perfectly spaced. The Victrix Guard broke into a run and ranged out ahead.

  Roboute Guilliman stopped in front of a section of cliff that looked no different to any of the others. He spread his hand upon the ice. It was so old time and pressure had squeezed all impurities from it. Under the dark of the sky it was almost as blue as Ultramarine armour.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Dig.’

  Water ran as fluid across the unnamed world, perhaps for the first time in its history. Huge clouds of steam roared skywards from the touch of the melta beams, and then, when the surface was breached and the Space Marines had gouged out a smooth entrance, blasted from the growing tunnel with great force. The vapour froze on anything it touched, coating the Space Marines nearest to the excavation site in hoarfrost an inch thick.

  A shout came over the vox. ‘Wraithbone.’

  ‘The aeldari?’ Sicarius asked.

  Guilliman nodded, but said nothing more. A few minutes later, the last of the vapours ceased roaring from the tunnel and the cutting team emerged encased in ice. It clung in clear sheets to the flat parts of their battleplate, cracking in small showers from their joints, melting and then refreezing around their armour’s heat vents in a steady cycle.

  ‘There is a tunnel, my lord. Stairs.’ The Space Marine was unsurprised. All of them had seen stranger things than a city hidden in ice.

  ‘I have an auspex sounding now,’ said Sicarius. ‘There is a building inside this cliff. It is large. We are detecting energy sources, psychic, fusion, more. All theoreticals demand a commander be protected, and I would be preparing myself to escort you, but I have spent enough time in your presence now to know that you will be going alone.’

  ‘I will,’ said Guilliman. ‘I would thank you not to try to convince me otherwise.’

  ‘Noted,’ said Sicarius. ‘I will urge you to caution, however.’

  ‘You do not need to,’ said Roboute Guilliman. ‘It is my greatest fault.’

  ‘I do not trust the aeldari, my lord. Be on your guard.’

  ‘Then you are wiser than you look, Captain Sicarius,’ said Guilliman.

  With those words he went inside, bowing to navigate the low ceiling of the freshly carved tunnel.

  Sicarius arrayed his warriors in a defensive formation outside the entrance and told them to wait.

  Rippled ice caught Guilliman’s stablights and refracted them into an eerie glow. Veils of turquoise and aquamarine shifted in the glacial depths, seeming to dance around darker shapes that flowed away to nothing when looked at directly.

  The distance to the complex’s entrance was a hundred metres inside the ice sheet. Under such masses of frozen material, there should have been a constant chorus of musical fractures and harmonic growling as the ice moved. Even if entirely inert, as was possible on so small and cold a world, the tunnel should have awoken the ice as the melting forced a redistribution of load, yet there was nothing but hollow, sinister silences.

  Guilliman’s hand trailed along the tunnel walls, the cold penetrating through his armour and chilling his fingers. He enjoyed the sensation, as it was directly felt by his own flesh and blood, not mediated by the machine’s sensorium, and that was all too rare a happening.

  A soft luminance filled the tunnel from another source, and Guilliman shut off his suit lights. The glow was familiar to him: the lambency of aeldari technology.

  His warriors had uncovered a double doorway of sculpted psychoplastic, decorated with simple curves. Despite having been subjected to the full force of melta weaponry, it was unmarked, remaining a pale colour close to bone, though warm with inner life. The doors were only part uncovered. Their shape suggested a pointed archway, but a height only to Guilliman’s head had been exposed. They parted as he approached, opening onto an elegant stairway completely free of ice.

  As he ducked through the doors, Guilliman’s armour detected the subtle pressures of an atmospheric retention field, and he paused to unclasp his helm and draw it off. The pressure was exactly equal, the air fresh and spiced with the strange perfumes of aeldari kind. Wraith glow underlit the steps and shone upon a dozen statues arranged in alcoves spaced up the flight. It was as perfect and clean as if the inhabitants had left only moments before, though Guilliman would wager no aeldari had been there for millennia.

  Although he did not know exactly where to go, he let his feet carry him forward, and presently he reached his destination.

  There was a windowless tower that nevertheless promised the finest of views, if one only knew how to see them. Beneath the soaring cone of the ceiling a lithe figure in black armour and a crescent-shaped helm float
ed cross-legged in mid-air. He was lit by a shaft of light that began nowhere, and orbited by an interweaving pattern of spinning runes.

  Roboute Guilliman met with the one he had called, one of the most powerful beings at large in the galaxy.

  ‘Greetings, Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of the Aeldari,’ said Guilliman. He spoke in the tongue of Ulthran’s people of Ulthwé.

  ‘And to you, son of the Emperor of Mankind, my ally, and my enemy.’

  ‘Enemy I sometimes am to your people, and so I am grateful that you have come,’ said Guilliman. The tower room was well furnished, including a number of chairs. All were far too small for his bulk, and so he remained standing.

  ‘I expended a great deal of effort in bringing you back to life,’ said Ulthran distantly; his attention was not wholly on the encounter. ‘I would be foolish not to heed your call if you are to fulfil your purpose. All men require guidance from time to time, and for all your father’s art, you are mostly a man.’

  ‘What is the purpose you have in mind for me?’ asked Guilliman.

  ‘That is not the question you came to ask, but I will answer it anyway. The task you must fulfil is the one you appointed yourself, that of the saviour of humanity.’ Ulthran looked down. ‘If it would not be offensive to suggest,’ he said, switching to Imperial Gothic, ‘I would prefer to conduct this conversation in your language. You are one of the very few sons of Terra who can speak our tongue at all. You do so very well, but there are certain subtleties you do not manage perfectly, and it grates upon my ears.’

  ‘I apologise for my lack of expertise,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ulthran, staring ahead again. ‘The fault is yours, of course, but one day you will master it. Virtually none of your species, no matter how mighty, ever could nor ever will.’ He caught a rune from the air, examined it and set it in motion again. The rustle of his robes was loud in the city’s immemorial silences.

  ‘I can feel your discomfort at this new era,’ Eldrad said. His gothic was accented in a way that imbued the language with fresh beauty. ‘I sense your pain. You have a great burden to bear, almost as great as mine. You and I both have seen all we hold dear cast down by folly, and are pained by the misery of what took its place. We are kindred spirits, in a way. Ask your question. I will answer, as a favour, in recognition of our shared sorrows.’

  ‘You already know what I want to ask.’

  ‘Ask anyway,’ said Eldrad Ulthran. ‘As you must.’

  Guilliman looked away, casting his eyes over the perfectly preserved ghost room he found himself in. He wondered who had lived here, or if anyone ever had. The aeldari were enigmatic, and despite their physical similarities to humanity, were alien of thought.

  ‘For the last several months I have studied the workings of this armour that I wear, and that I have not removed since it was placed upon my body years ago,’ he said. ‘I believe I understand how it functions, and what it does, broadly speaking. The prophetess Yvraine warned me never to remove it, but I must. What I do not know is whether I will survive its removal.’

  ‘This is not your famed caution at work,’ said Eldrad Ulthran. ‘That is rashness speaking. Leave it on, if you are afraid.’

  ‘I am not afraid. I simply lack sufficient understanding to assess the risks. There is a personal element, of course. I have no desire to die again, but I can account for my concern while calculating the probability of my death.’

  ‘The issue is that you understand full well what the armour does physically for you, but there is another element to it. An element of the spirit.’

  ‘I cannot give that credence,’ said Guilliman plainly.

  Eldrad Ulthran gave a dry chuckle. ‘How difficult it must be for you, a child of the Emperor’s enlightenment, to judge these things. The armour sustains your soul. When you were wounded by your fallen brother, the cut went past flesh and wounded your eternal being. That wound will never heal.’

  ‘It is true I feel an emptiness inside myself,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘That is the injury of the soul.’

  ‘Be that as it may, you have not answered my question. Will I survive?’

  ‘The question is wrong. It is not will you survive, but are you capable of surviving?’ Eldrad raised his hand and gestured at the circling runes. ‘These are the tools by which I might read the skein,’ he said. ‘These runes represent you. There are many of them, as you can see. Their interaction is complex. Hard even for me to read. If I go into the othersea, where I may look directly upon the branchings of what may come to be, your path is difficult to follow. To remove the Armour of Fate risks not only death, but ultimate annihilation. Even if you do not die, its removal will affect you profoundly in a way you will find uncomfortable. There is grief woven tight about every possible future for you, Roboute Guilliman. Take off this armour, and the emptiness you feel will grow to a void that can never, ever be filled.’

  ‘Sorrow I can bear,’ he said. ‘I have endured more of that than any being. What is a little more?’

  ‘You do not know my sorrows,’ said Eldrad. He looked again at the primarch. When his head shifted, Guilliman realised he could see the ceiling through the helm. Eldrad was fading away. He must get his answer quickly, or not at all.

  ‘You cannot know all of mine either, for all your psychic gifts.’

  ‘This is true,’ said the farseer. ‘Remove the armour, if you wish. There will be consequences. Of what degree is down to you – it is an outcome dictated by your will, and the strength of your own soul. Annihilation, death, or simply sadness. I cannot answer this question, no more than could Cawl’s puppet. You can answer it only yourself, and ask it only by doing.’

  ‘Then I will not die,’ said Guilliman firmly.

  Eldrad nodded. ‘That is entirely up to you.’ The aeldari and his runes were vanishing from view, a spectre caught in full sunlight. ‘There is a further thing you have not said.’

  ‘Is there?’ asked Guilliman.

  ‘You wish to be free of the influence of my kind,’ Eldrad said, his voice fading with his body. ‘You see the armour as a gaoler holding you hostage to our whims. Know this – the fates of humanity and aeldari are bound together. Either both species will survive, or neither will. Your Emperor understands this. There are greater enemies than the primordial annihilator. In the times to come, you will see. The struggle is only beginning. The old war returns.’ Ulthran was an outline, a shadow. ‘Remember this conversation, and reconsider carefully, on the day realisation comes, whether you wish to stand alone.’

  Eldrad Ulthran was gone.

  Guilliman left the unliving city to itself.

  Guilliman chose his arming chamber for the task of removal. The day came quickly, and before he knew it, he was on the cusp of the moment. Four high-ranking adepts of the Cult Mechanicus waited on his command, as did medicae, Apothecaries and a host of servitors. Apart from the large, upright arming cradle made for his stature, the room was more operating theatre than armoury, being full of medical equipment, the air prickly with the astringent scents of counterseptic. A large section of the space was taken up with a primarch-sized operating table, over which a multi-limbed chirurgeon hovered in readiness.

  Nobody spoke. Guilliman stood in the door. Weighing his decision one final time, he looked behind him into the greater hall that housed his museum of weaponry. The lights in the Grand Hall of Armaments were out, and the collection of armours it contained were dark silhouettes, all inert, simple machines that possessed none of the dangers his own wargear did.

  This section of the ship was the one most badly damaged by the Red Corsairs during their tenure. He remembered coming aboard after the vessel’s retrieval, sorrowing at the damage done, soothing his anger by its restoration. He wondered, as he returned his gaze to the specially made machinery awaiting him, if he was risking similar damage to all the Imperium by taking this cour
se of action.

  What if he died?

  I can be nobody’s slave, he thought firmly. He stepped into the arming cradle and gripped the armrests so tightly the metal sang.

  ‘Begin,’ he said.

  A servitor raised a cybernetic arm, the power tool mounted in place of its hand already rotating. The bit engaged smoothly with a locking bolt upon the primarch’s greave.

  Guilliman gritted his teeth as the bolt was withdrawn, and he took his fate back into his own hands.

  About the Author

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

  An extract from Dark Imperium.

  The void is impossible for the human mind to encompass.

  Within the galaxy mankind calls home there are three hundred billion stars. Around these revolve hundreds of billions of worlds, and the spaces between are crowded by a diversity of objects which defy enumeration. Mankind’s galaxy is but one of trillions of galaxies in a universe of unguessable size. The distances between even proximate astronomical bodies are inconceivable to creatures evolved to walk the warmer regions of single small world.

  This is why the void cannot be understood. Not by men, nor by their machines.

  The magi of Mars insist on their understanding, but their apprehension can only ever be an abstraction, dead numbers modelled by dead-flesh cogitators. No matter how brutally expanded their minds, men cannot comprehend the majesty of the void.