Dark Imperium: Godblight Read online

  He was Illiyanne Natasé, emissary of Eldrad Ulthran, Guilliman’s ally.

  Felix was born of a more tolerant age, and the xenos incited curiosity in him rather than hatred. Natasé was a valued advisor to Guilliman, but his presence in the Concilia was not widely known, and for some time he had been away from the flagship treating with his own people, who had come to aid the fight in Ultramar’s west. Despite Felix’s closeness to Guilliman, even his own dealings with Natasé had been minimal. Natasé was a secret, much like what was about to happen. Both were secrets of the most damaging kind.

  Natasé performed an elaborate greeting to the primarch, closer to a dance than a bow. If a human had performed the same actions, he would have seemed absurd, but the aeldari was graceful, the movements beautiful, and the fine charms he wore all about his person only accentuated his elegance as they swung with his movements.

  ‘My lord Roboute Guilliman.’

  ‘You are ready?’ asked the primarch.

  ‘I am,’ said Natasé. ‘I have consulted the skein, difficult as it is, surrounded by so many crude minds. You will be able to interrogate the daemon. It will answer you.’ The xenos was hard to read, his body language rich but alien. Guilliman understood it better than Felix.

  ‘You are like Decimus here. You do not think we should perform this questioning,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘I do not,’ said Natasé firmly. ‘The daemon bound to this man is a fragment of the Great Changer. Nothing you will hear from its mouth will be the truth, even when it is speaking the truth. You are intelligent for something derived from human stock, Lord Guilliman, but I fear you will do yourself nothing but harm should you proceed.’

  Guilliman stared at the xenos. Natasé was so slight, Felix thought, like a bundle of rushes dressed and set to look like a man, so feeble the weight of Guilliman’s regard alone should have crushed him, but he stood firm.

  ‘Your prognostications told you this?’ Guilliman asked.

  ‘Eldrad Ulthran commanded me to be as straightforward with you as I can, for yours is not a subtle species, and there is much you will never understand,’ he said. ‘In truth, I cannot see what will befall you. The pathways created by the Changer of the Ways are convoluted, and lead never to where one thinks they might, before they reach their inevitable destination.’

  ‘Corruption. Madness. Damnation,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘Terse, unpoetic, but apt,’ said the aeldari. There was a hint of mockery in the way he mimicked Guilliman’s speech pattern. ‘My advice to you is dictated partly by this uncertainty, but partly because I know these daemons of old. Every word they utter is a trap.’

  ‘Then do you refuse to help me find it?’

  ‘No, I will not refuse,’ said Natasé, and his arrogance was tempered by regret. ‘I am bound by oath to aid you in whatever way I can. Eldrad Ulthran said that I was to listen to you. He said that you are…’ The xenos considered his words carefully. ‘Superior even to us, in some ways.’ It was evident he found the idea distasteful.

  ‘I thank you for your counsel, seer. We will go on. Let us be about it. I will not have Remo suffer for any longer than is necessary. Bring in the prisoner,’ Guilliman commanded.

  As soon as the words were spoken, the temperature in the room dropped. The iris hatch lensed open. Lifter wheels squealed, a silvery unlight shone up from the shaft, and frost spidered over the rusted walls. The runes burst into life with audible cracks as psychic power shocked the metal. A hexagrammatic circle around the hatch, invisible before, glimmered, then flared so brightly that Felix’s helm reacted, and darkened his eye-lenses.

  The possessed man and his guard rose up on a platform.

  Despite the timeless prison of the stasis field the daemonhost had been held in, Chaos had pushed itself deeply into the clay of Remo’s body. His skin had become a sickening, mottled pink, and was covered with sores. He was emaciated, the twisted bones showing, obviously in the process of turning into something new. Knobs and spurs protruded from his joints. A group of horns sprouted from one side of his face, covering over his features completely on the left, all but the mouth, whose downturned tusks pulled into a permanent, drooling sneer. Black teeth sharp as flints crowded bleeding gums. Though it should have made the daemonhost look like a witless fool, somehow the expression managed to convey a dangerous cunning, and amusement.

  As for the man Interrogator Remo had been, little was left of him but his suffering. His arms were looped over the crossbar of a T-shaped crucifix of shining metal, his hands manacled behind him in rune-stamped chains of the same blue steel. Loops of razor wire about his elbows and his waist tied him in place. Fiercely glowing warding charms hung from it in bunches. His feet were pinned to the metal upright by a single silver nail, whose head was struck with a complex sigil. This, and all the other arcane symbols around him, glowed with an unnatural heat. Black flames licked around his bonds, burning his flesh wherever they touched. It was an agonising position to be bound in for any length of time, yet Remo held himself utterly still, single yellow eye staring ahead. It locked with Felix’s gaze. It was deep, he thought, that gaze. Two pupils swam around the iris, shifting with ever-changing patterns like the Great Rift that split the galaxy. Behind them were infinities.

  Before Felix could look away, memory rose unbidden.

  Felix remembered the day he had uncovered Tjejren’s plot. A so-called scrying ritual to find the network of Mortarion’s corruption. He had no warning the inquisitor was going to bind a daemon to his servant until the last moment. He had intervened, Tjejren had fled. Remo remained, already damned. Felix had lost six good men before Remo had been subdued. Stasis and psychic lock had contained him, just.

  Felix’s misgivings redoubled. A coldness touched both his hearts. He had sent Remo back to Vespator to be safely dealt with by his psykers, fearing that merely killing him might unleash the daemon trapped in his flesh, for what did he know of these matters, even now? Yet he had returned from Alveiro to discover the daemonhost not dead, but already on board a Null Ship of the Anathema Psykana, and heading out of the system. He was appalled to find the order had come directly from the primarch himself. Doubt assailed him. He loved Guilliman as a father, but this, surely, was a step most assuredly in the wrong direction. Remo was possessed by Chaos, and should not be treated with in any way. His memory of fighting this thing collapsed into fire, and he saw a bloody future, where a dark mockery of Guilliman presided over an Imperium of despair and suffering. This is how damnation began, as a single bad action made in good faith. History turned on the point of spear.

  If only it could be stopped, he thought. A single sword thrust. A moment’s work. He would die, but the future would be…

  Felix tore his gaze away from the daemon. He was sweating under his armour. His hand was around his sword hilt, ready to draw.

  Guilliman glanced at him.

  ‘Be wary, Decimus,’ said Guilliman. ‘Do not heed its temptations.’

  Felix nodded, and recovered himself. ‘Yes, my lord.’ He avoided its gaze from then on.

  Around Remo’s neck was a collar, also alight with warding sigils. A chain led from the collar. The end of it was held in the hand of his guard, a warrior in unusual Terminator battleplate, and he too was terrible to behold in his way.

  Where Remo raged with heat, Ionan Grud radiated a chill deeper than the void, and Felix realised it was from his influence that the frost came and the air froze. Felix was used to psychic matters. His own advisors included among their number many potent psykers, and he had fought against all manner of warp abominations and sorcerers since he had been awoken, but the sense of power coming off Grud was of an entirely different order of magnitude. He imagined this was what it must feel like to be close to the Emperor Himself. Felix’s soul trembled in its presence. The tetrarch was a mighty warrior, but he knew without a doubt that if the Grey Knights captain turned on him, he would
die in moments, and that along with his body his soul would be annihilated.

  Guilliman was unaffected by either daemon or warrior-mystic.

  ‘Captain Grud,’ he said, ‘are you prepared?’

  ‘I stand ready,’ said the captain. His voice was condemnatory, a tone accentuated by the harshness of his voxmitter.

  ‘Natasé,’ said Guilliman, ‘begin.’

  The aeldari was shaking, profoundly affected by Grud’s sledgehammer presence. Farseers were immensely powerful psykers, but their talents were less aggressive than those of the Grey Knights, and the sensibilities of his race were altogether finer than those of humans. He came forward carefully, as if approaching a raging fire, reaching into a pouch by his side as he did so. Speaking quickly in his own tongue, he drew out a number of small objects; angular runes, they appeared to be. With great care he set them spinning one by one in the palm of his hand, then threw them up into the air, where they took up orbits around the daemon and his gaoler, trailing silvery light, until Grud and Remo were surrounded by a complex, intersecting pattern. Felix heard the names of various aeldari deities in the liquid speech coming from the farseer’s helm, but caught nothing else.

  When the cage was woven, the farseer stepped back. His runes continued their orbit.

  ‘He is bound,’ said Natasé hoarsely.

  The daemonhost continued to stare ahead, only at Felix. The tetrarch felt the thing was attempting to share a private joke with him.

  ‘Interrogator Remo,’ Guilliman said. ‘Speak to me.’

  Instantly, the thing’s head snapped back and forth so quickly it became a blur, and the possessed man gave out a deep, feline growl.

  ‘Remo. Fight,’ commanded the primarch. ‘There is will left in you yet.’

  The daemonhost’s head ceased jerking about, and came to a dead stop. It laughed.

  ‘Thy servant is no more, consumed by me, he is part of me. Part of the Lord of Change, as all things were and all things are and all things will be,’ the daemonhost said. ‘No hope for him, or for thee, my petty mortal lord.’

  Guilliman glanced at Grud. The Grey Knight yanked hard upon the chain, tugging the daemonhost forward. Blue fire sped up the links, and seared the thing’s flesh. It let out an outraged snarl.

  ‘Let forward the spirit of Remo, so he may speak with us,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘No,’ said the daemonhost. ‘This body is mine. His soul is mine. I will not let him speak.’

  ‘Already you reveal your weakness and your lies. How can he be gone and yet still able to speak? Release him,’ Guilliman said. Again he looked to Grud.

  Runes flared all over the Grey Knight’s armour as he declaimed a litany of ancient Gothic, finishing with a series of sounds that tortured the hearing of all in the room and echoed in unseen spaces. The bound daemon screamed at the speaking of its name, thrashing in its bonds. Natasé staggered back. The Space Marine Librarians braced themselves, eye-lenses glowing as they exerted their formidable wills to contain the daemon. The Grey Knight ceased speaking, and the words died away, only slowly, leaving sibilances that seemed sharp enough to draw blood hanging long in the room.

  Remo hung slackly from his pole and crossbar. He seemed more human now, afflicted instead of dangerous. The wires mortified his flesh, and blood, the bright red of mortal kind, ran down his body.

  ‘I have your true name, daemon,’ Guilliman said. ‘Do you think I would petition you like some footling sorcerer, ready to sell my soul for scraps of knowledge? I am the last son of the Emperor of Terra. You will heed me and you will obey!’

  ‘Speak, then, with your puling serf,’ said the daemon’s voice.

  Remo’s head rose, and now the surviving eye was human, light brown and full of pain.

  ‘My lord, it knows you will destroy it. I…’ He winced, and gritted his black teeth. ‘It will not tell you what you wish to know. I cannot force it to be…’ He shook violently. Blood poured from his mouth, and his chest convulsed. He groaned, and rallied himself. ‘My lord, help me, I wish to serve, but I cannot bear this much longer. Kill me, I beg you.’

  ‘It will tell me,’ said Guilliman coldly. ‘We have its name. It has no choice, is that not correct?’

  Remo’s head jerked, and his eye rolled back, performing a complete rotation, until the yellow iris with its double pupil appeared again.

  ‘Curse thee, son of the Anathema!’ it said. ‘Curse thee and all thy feeble kind! Great Tzeentch is rising, thou art his pawn. Canst thou not see it? I will tell thee nothing!’

  ‘You will speak.’ Guilliman rested his hand upon the pommel of the Sword of the Emperor. ‘You will speak now, and then with this blade I will burn your essence from existence. There is nothing you can do about this. I abhor you. I abjure you. But before your wickedness is seared from reality for all eternity, you will speak and damn your very master!’

  The daemon writhed. ‘Never!’ it said, though its words were pained.

  ‘Tell me, what is my brother Mortarion’s plan?’

  ‘I will not speak.’

  ‘Speak!’ Guilliman shouted, and Felix was buffeted by his force of will. The scene in the room was horrifying enough, but beneath the skin of reality, rival currents moved, great tides of psychic energy that tore at the tetrarch. All of them, the farseer, the Grey Knight, the Space Marine Librarians, were affected by it, but not Roboute Guilliman. ‘You are a weaver of schemes, your master is my brother’s sworn enemy. Tell me of his plans, and you shall at least die in service to your twisted liege, who might enjoy a little victory when I destroy my sibling.’

  ‘No!’

  The daemon writhed. The razor wire cut into its stolen flesh, carving bloody strips from Remo’s body. The black fires around its hands and feet burned up, consuming the host. Acrid smoke filled the room. Felix heard Remo’s all too human screams beneath the daemon’s howls. Again, the Grey Knight intoned the daemon’s name, causing it to shriek. One of the Space Marine Librarians collapsed, his armour tolling loudly on the floor. Natasé’s runes rotated faster and faster about the daemonhost.

  ‘Speak,’ commanded Guilliman.

  The daemonhost suddenly slumped forward. The raw wash of conflicted spiritual energy subsided. A hot silence fell.

  Natasé said something in his alien tongue. ‘Now comes the most dangerous time, beware!’ he added in Gothic.

  The daemonhost raised its head. In twinned voices it spoke, the Neverborn’s subordinate now to Remo’s. Black tears ran down its face.

  ‘Ask thy questions, oh son of the Anathema. Nine shalt thou have, as is Tzeentch’s boon.’

  Guilliman was ready.

  ‘Where is Mortarion?’

  The daemonhost shuddered. ‘He awaits thee upon Iax, as he told thee himself. Eight questions remain.’

  ‘What is his intention?’

  ‘To kill thee. Seven questions hast thou left.’

  ‘How?’ said Guilliman.

  ‘By disease, in honour of his god, Nurgle, lord of blights, the master of seven and three. Six more you may ask.’

  Guilliman stopped to think. The bound daemon was true to the ways of its kind, giving the most limited answers. All would be misleading. The primarch had to be careful.

  ‘I am a primarch, created by the Emperor. I am immune to all disease. If Mortarion is to slay me by sickness, it must be of an uncanny sort. By what means is this possible?’

  The daemon hissed. Remo sobbed, choking up the words. ‘Upon Iax, Ku’Gath Plaguefather works, thrice-cursed Unclean One, first in favour of Nurgle. He stirs the pot of Nurgle himself. It is by the pestilence brewed within the cauldron that he would kill thee, foolish mortal. He has thy blood. Five more.’

  ‘That was a full answer, my lord, and liable to be full of treachery,’ warned Natasé.

  ‘I will not discount it,’ said Guilliman. ‘Tell me, daemon. I
have read of this cauldron. It is known to my loremasters. Does it have a role to play in the net of corruption Mortarion has cast over my realm?’

  The daemon howled. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ It thrashed and cried, cursing its own words as they poured from its mouth. ‘It is the source, the cesspit, the giver of corruption, the heart that pumps filth throughout thy realm. Four answers I will give thee now, no more!’

  ‘And if it is destroyed, his hold on Ultramar will be broken?’

  ‘A grievous blow will be dealt to him, who is son of plague and son of Anathema both! Three left.’

  ‘Where is it?’ said Guilliman.

  The daemon became sly. ‘In the warp. In Nurgle’s Garden. Two.’

  Guilliman shifted, annoyed. he had formulated his question poorly.

  ‘Where is it upon Iax?’

  ‘Everywhere. Nowhere. On Iax,’ said the creature. ‘One.’

  ‘Do not toy with me!’ Guilliman said, and took a step forward. He pulled the Emperor’s Sword a finger’s width out of its scabbard. Bright fire burned along the exposed blade. ‘You know this sword. In moments, I will use it to end you.’

  Gurgling laughter sounded. Though its source was the daemon, it seemed to come from all corners of the room, and it ate at Felix’s soul like acid.

  ‘Thou threatens me with annihilation, then why should I tell thee anything at all?’

  ‘Because you are bound! Tell me, where upon Iax will I find the cauldron so that it might be destroyed?’

  ‘It is nowhere, it is everywhere. Iax is become Pestiliax. It is no longer yours, or of this realm.’

  ‘Speak! Tell me more!’

  The daemonhost writhed. Remo’s voice became stronger, more urgent. ‘He will drag your kingdom entire into the warp, you are the key. It will become the stinking playground of the Plague God. You rush to this end, and your recklessness will see his plans come to pass.’

  ‘That is no answer to my question, where is the cauldron? I command it!’

  The daemon shook, resisting the compulsion laid upon it, the conflict within lifting it up from its cross. Dark light blazed a halo about its twisted head, and a smell of burnt spices choked the chamber’s occupants. ‘A place of life made one of sickness, where neither earth nor water hold sway, but both are lords. Death’s garden, where the plague lords play. Iron bound, the king of poxes wreaks his deadly design upon thy mundanity.’