Prologue to Nikaea Read online

  Even now, directly challenged, Arkanasia did not retreat. ‘No. But we are made in His image. Our powers are His.’

  Malcador held her stare for a few moments longer. She had already revealed enough to warrant censure, at the very least. He would not take action yet, though. Not until he knew the full extent of what was happening on Thawra. He pointed to the red circle on the map and changed the subject. ‘The war is not over,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Arkanasia admitted. She frowned, and the light in her eyes dimmed. ‘I am not sure why that is. We had the rebels on the run. They were broken.’

  ‘They have a stronghold at this location?’ Collatinus asked.

  ‘Of a kind. There are no settlements in that region. There are some natural caves, and the rebels are using them.’

  ‘How extensive is the network?’

  ‘There isn’t one, as far as we know. The caves are not much more than recesses in the cliff faces. Even conventional forces should have finished them by now, and my entire force of psykers is engaged in the fight.’

  My force of psykers, Malcador noted.

  ‘What are you hearing from the front?’

  ‘Nothing. The warp energy released by the fighting is too strong. It has disrupted our communications.’

  Malcador turned to Collatinus. ‘We know where we must go.’

  ‘Yes!’ Arkanasia cried, ecstatic again when Collatinus nodded. ‘Then you will see. You must bear witness, first lord, to what we have accomplished here. And you will know what must be done.’

  I hope you are right, Malcador thought. He said nothing to Arkanasia. She was caught in the grip of her vision. Words would serve no purpose now. And she was right. He had to see what she had done for himself.

  The storm was familiar. Eight hundred metres away from its edge, from the top of a slope leading down to the dead end of a gorge, Malcador stared at the vortex of exploding warp energy and recognised the convulsion that had summoned him to Thawra. He had not thought there were features in the storm to memorise. During his meditation in the Vortex Chamber, he had registered only the danger, not the details of the tempest’s face. Or so he had thought. But here it was again, and he knew it. It seemed to him that it welcomed his recognition, that the destruction it wreaked was for his benefit, to mock him above all others. The storm had been in the non-space of the immaterium. Now it was here, at a very particular point in the materium, waiting for him. It was not huge. It was no more than a kilometre wide at most. Yet its reach was vast. It was a destroyer of hopes, a clarion of menace, a promise of madness for a galaxy. The tempest was not yet a full breach in the real, but that disaster would not be long in coming.

  ‘No,’ Arkanasia said when she saw the battlefield. ‘This isn’t… I can’t believe that…’ She could not finish her denials. The betrayal of her hopes was too great.

  The gorge dipped sharply from the point where Collatinus had ordered the shield company to halt. The cliffs were three hundred metres high, and had been drawing closer together. For the last few hundred metres there had been no room for the Custodians to march more than four abreast. Now the canyon widened again, before ending at another three-hundred-metres-high sheer wall.

  The maelstrom raged at the base of the cliffs, concealing the bottom third of them. If there were caves there in which the rebels had taken refuge, they were invisible, and Malcador doubted if they still existed.

  The storm churned in one direction, then another. Coiling arms of power collided, sending monstrous, coronal arcs skyward. The confusion drew the eye and savaged the mind. It was made of warring nightmare and maddened thought. It was not physical, yet it sundered air and stone. There were no colours, yet it was a blinding darkness. Malcador glanced at the storm, looked away, then glanced again, trying to gain the measure of its force.

  You will know what must be done. Arkanasia’s proclamation echoed in his thoughts, a bitter, curdled refrain.

  You must know, he told himself. Find the way forward, and stop the losses here.

  The terrain at the edges of the tempest was littered with ruined bodies and weapons. Lasrifles had fused with arms. Heads had elongated until they resembled pale serpents. Three Chimeras had become one, sprouting disjointed legs. The front of the lead vehicle had become a gaping maw, and the monster had tried to devour its hindquarters.

  Inside the storm, more monsters were being born. For all its fury, the vortex itself was silent, though the screams and roars of the combatants inside were perfectly audible. Some of the voices were still mostly human, consumed by a frenzy of madness and hate. Others were changed, their tones all wrong, as if the beings who cried out had teeth in their throats or mouths on their tongues. Together they created a choir of psychic war, one where the purpose of battle had been lost, and all that remained was the need to destroy.

  Arkanasia staggered a few steps down the slope. Her eyes were fixed on the maelstrom. ‘If I voxed them,’ she began. ‘Maybe from here…’

  ‘There is no one who can hear you in there,’ Malcador told her. ‘Look away, acting governor.’

  She did not listen, and kept walking with slow, dragging steps.

  ‘There is nothing to be salvaged here,’ said Collatinus.

  ‘Agreed.’ Malcador grimaced. Arkanasia’s project had failed. There might not even be anything to learn from the failure. ‘Begin your assault, shield-captain. We must leave nothing alive.’

  Collatinus issued commands, and the Custodian Guard formed a single line. They moved past Arkanasia, their guardian spears pointed towards the tempest. The composite weapons unleashed a stream of bolter fire into the storm. The Custodians were firing blind, but they aimed low, and each warrior swept his bolter-equipped spear back and forth on a narrow arc. The field of fire from the shield company was comprehensive. The barrage would be devastating for anyone caught in its path.

  If the Custodian Guard had been firing into a material storm, the battle would have ended in a few short minutes. Malcador did hear new screams as the bolt shells tore into the convulsing, searing shadow. But this was only an opening attack. Space inside the tempest would be erratic, untrustworthy. The shells themselves could easily be transforming. The true attack fell to Malcador.

  He edged forward, staying level with the Legio Custodes, gathering his strength. First he had to know his enemy, and to do that, his defences would need to be strong.

  Less than ninety metres from the fringes of the storm, he felt he was ready. ‘Hold our position here, shield-captain,’ he said to Collatinus, and he moved to a boulder a few paces away. He climbed on top and, looking past the line of the Custodian Guard, he focused his sight on the storm to the exclusion of all else.

  The materium receded to the edge of Malcador’s perception. He reached out for the storm, and the storm reached for him, eager to share its secrets, eager for him to join in its revel. He raised the walls of his will higher, bracing them against the battering of Chaotic waves. He observed from the ramparts of his defences, ready for war, reading the enemy and preparing his counter-attack. There was promise and power in the warp, and he drew on that power, but in the storm, he knew there was no promise. That knowledge reinforced his psychic armour.

  There is nothing here for you. There is only destruction, and it must be destroyed in turn.

  The barrage from the shield company gave him a way in. The bolt shells brought a violent reality into the nightmare, causing enough damage to create fractures in the storm. Malcador’s consciousness perceived the cracks, and he followed them, holding on to the points of weakness in the tempest, seeking how to pry them open further. The tempest came at him with secrets and whispers. He closed his mind to the whispers, and he chose only the secrets that he needed to fight back.

  It reached past him, too, attacking Arkanasia. Malcador was aware of her psychic light and agony as searing blisters at the edge of his focus. She was fighting, but
her despair was a crack in her armour. He had to defeat the storm before she became a second threat.

  Malcador began to see the contours of the maelstrom. The shape of its psychic winds contained the trace of its history. As cyclones of fury buffeted him, he sought their base, and found the tormented psyche of a human every time. He saw how the storm had come to be. The struggle between the rebels and the loyalists had spiralled out of control. Too many psykers, too close together, had attacked each other with too little thought to discipline and the forces they were unleashing. Order had disintegrated, and identities had begun to flow and merge with the untamed warp. The beliefs that had driven both sides of the conflict no longer existed. What remained were only the impulses that fuelled war for its own sake. Anger, desperation and fear had taken the combatants. The storm fed on their raging psyches, and it amplified their powers. Malcador saw little in the vortex that was remotely human, but there were still presences, cores of things that had been human, and were chained to bodies. The flesh was changing as the immaterium strengthened its grip, but the anchor was there, and gave Malcador his opportunity.

  Malcador could bring the fight to what remained of the minds who had created the storm. So he did. The tempest roared around his defences, psychic winds and waves hurling themselves against the isolated promontory of a human who dared project himself into their midst. He held on even more tightly to his walls, because it was in attacking that the great risk would come. The storm would try to make him abandon himself to battle, and so sweep him away.

  The materium became the weakest, greyest of frames for the struggle. With an effort, Malcador split his focus precisely in two, between defence and attack, keeping both in balance, strengthening each other. And from his ramparts, he unleashed his own storm, a blast of forked warp lightning, striking multiple targets at once. Mortal nodes of the storm erupted in psychic fire, body and mind burning alike, destruction taking them on one plane and then spreading to the other. Malcador lashed out again, and then again. He was disciplined ferocity. He took the inchoate and gave it form, and his purpose was unshakeable. The things that had been rebels and loyalists died. He took two armies down, a lord of lightning. The vertigo of power came close to catching him, but his defences held fast, and he refused the false promise.

  Malcador held fast to purpose and duty, and the storm began to weaken before his assault. Deprived of human fuel, the cyclones evaporated. The broader maelstrom contracted, and the currents became less violent as Malcador destroyed the nodes. Energy flashed, lost coherence and evaporated.

  As the tempest retreated, Malcador fought back the new temptations of victory and speed. His discipline and his defences were more important than ever, and he held by them. Even so, he saw the end of the struggle come into view.

  Then two things happened. One was real. The other he would doubt for years to come.

  Through his gossamer-thin connection to the materium, Malcador saw Arkanasia break into a run. She was shouting something he could not hear. She scrambled past the end of the Custodians’ line, skirted the edge of the barrage and pelted down the slope towards the storm. Psychic charges surrounded her, growing stronger.

  Inside the tempest, something moved. Malcador had no clear sense of what it was. It stirred the currents of the storm, and it reached out from deeper in the warp. It acted with purpose. It was a dark sentience, a thing whose existence Malcador wished he could deny, yet knew he must face.

  Answering the command of a being that pressed against the thinning veil of the materium, raging that it could not yet manifest itself, the remaining human nodes in the storm suddenly redirected all their force. Focused energy blasted out of the storm and into Arkanasia. Her aura exploded with brilliance. It grew, turning her into a colossus of monstrous, coruscating light. The stone around her burst into flame.

  She stopped running. She turned around.

  Malcador saw the attack to come. He pulled back from the storm, rushing back to protect his body. The tempest dragged at him and he was slow, too slow. Collatinus saw the danger too, and the Custodians trained their bolter fire on Arkanasia. The shells exploded at the edge of her aura. The storm withered further, its remaining fury turning her into a nova of power.

  She looked back up at Malcador. Her face was contorted in pain and strength and madness. She stretched her arms towards him, and he knew he could not withstand what was coming.

  The moment stretched out, and Arkanasia did not attack. She shrieked a single word, ‘EMPEROR!’ and she looked up. A volcanic eruption of warp flame launched upward from her, directed at nothing, draining her aura.

  The shells broke through the thinning energy, and she fell.

  Free of the warp, Malcador prepared a retaliatory blast of his own, but when he saw the glow around her fade to nothing, he held back.

  ‘Cease fire,’ Collatinus said. He joined Malcador as the Sigillite walked slowly down to where Arkanasia had fallen.

  The storm was gone. On the land it had concealed, carbonised bodies lay, contorted in the pain that had destroyed them. Their deformities were extreme. One was almost six metres long, another had five arms, and a third had a cluster of skulls sprouting out of each other. There was always just enough of the human form left to show what the dead thing had once been.

  Arkanasia’s flesh had burned from an internal fire. Though the bolter shells had hit her, the last of her psychic barrier had been enough to diminish their force – enough that they had not shredded her body on impact. She was, to Malcador’s surprise, still alive, though barely.

  Arkanasia’s eyes were blank, boiled white, yet they turned in Malcador’s direction when he knelt beside her. ‘I didn’t want this,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know.’

  A clawed, blackened hand clutched at his robe. ‘I didn’t dream well enough,’ she said. ‘Please, first lord, make a better dream.’

  ‘Something will be done,’ he told her.

  There was no response. Her hand was limp, and her eyes were still.

  Malcador stood. He turned around slowly, gazing at the bodies, at the aftermath of the psychic storm. ‘Something must be done,’ he said, this time to Collatinus.

  ‘Could she have been right?’ Collatinus asked. ‘Would better training have made the difference?’

  Or intensified the danger? Malcador thought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He was worried, too, about the fact that it wasn’t discipline that had stopped Arkanasia from attacking. It was religious belief. The very thing he would have had to condemn in Arkanasia had kept her faithful. That was not reassuring. The Emperor was right to command an end to faith. It had too many dangers. What if another kind of faith drove the rebels? he wondered. ‘The decision will not be mine to make,’ he said.

  ‘It will have to be made soon,’ said Collatinus.

  ‘So I will urge. I think it will be.’

  Collatinus nodded, satisfied.

  Malcador looked back at Arkanasia. With the end of the storm, the sun was beating hard down into the gorge, yet all he could feel was shadow.

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  An extract from Born of Flame.

  No one saw him die. The jungle just came alive and took him. Soundlessly, the trooper was simply gone. His slayer moved as a blur, blending with the shadows until it was lost in the heat haze. Scant light
penetrated the dense leaf canopy above. Men, shouting and panicking in a tightly packed column, went for their lamp packs. It was stifling in the heady gloom. Heat thickened the air, but the troopers’ bodies cooled with growing fear. Stabbing light beams sent night-beetles scurrying for dark hollows. Vine serpents hung inert in mimicry of their namesakes in hope of being overlooked. If only the men could play dead like that and the predator would pass… Flat leaves, that were not really leaves at all, heaved and pulsed, but there was no sign of the monster. Cries of panic subsided, usurped by a quiet tension as the jungle swallowed voices and stole the soldiers’ resolve. The discipline-master of the 888th Phaerian Imperial Army held up a clenched fist.

  Still. Stay still… and listen. If we listen, we will live.

  His brocade and jacket seemed incongruous amongst his bare- and barrel-chested charges. Phaerian death-worlders were brutish, slab-muscled men used to deltas and trackless swamps. Skulls jangled on their bandoliers, the rictus mouths clacking as if in amusement. Camo tattoos striped their pugnacious faces but couldn’t hide their fear. This was supposed to be their element.

  Hearts beating in two thousand chests made a louder clamour than the entire jungle in that moment. The forest held its breath.

  Lifting his puniter-stave, the discipline-master was about to order the advance when the cyber-hawk perched on his shoulder shrilled. The warning was too late. As if exhaling again, the jungle opened its maw and the discipline-master disappeared. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. Just like the trooper. They were being picked off.

  Snap fire from a dozen rifles chased the hole left by the discipline-master but the trail was cold before the soldiers had time to realise they were aiming at nothing. Order went with him, Army overseers powerless to prevent the two thousand-strong infantry group from unleashing carnage with their auto-carbines and scatter-locks. Hot las and solid shot spat out in all directions as the men vented their fear until their mags ran dry. Sections of Rapier and Tarantula gunners added heavier firepower to the barrage. The thick jungle in the immediate vicinity became a mulched flatland in under a minute. Electro-goads and vox-amplified orders bellowed at ear-bleeding volume eventually brought the madness under control.