Angron: The Red Angel by David Guymer

Author:David Guymer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science fiction: space opera
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Help–+

Please–+

Stop–+

This way–+

The Emperor pro–+

The warp on this side of the Rift clamoured with voices. Opening one’s mind to it was like opening a door onto millions of screaming petitioners, all of them begging, all of them shouting, all of them desperate to communicate but in a language of riddles in which Graucis Telomane had not been tutored. The ability to pluck a single voice from the tumult of a battlefield, to hear one cry for help from a billion, was of no advantage when the voices were unspoken and their messages unclear.

With both hands braced to the marble door frame that his mind had constructed to give this realm order, he bent his head to the clamour as if to a howling gale, and strained to listen.

A witch sings on Phoenix wings… The prince of spiders spins a web for the priest of ravens… The worms crawl beneath my skin, my skin is dying but it flourishes with new life… Help us, help us, help us…+

Astrotelepathy employed a common lexicon of dream imagery and allegory that allowed a trained psyker anywhere in the vastness of the Imperium to send their thoughts into the warp in the reasonable hope, via one or more astropathic relays, of having their cry received by another receptive mind and understood. It was akin to writing a short riddle, sealing it in a bottle, and tossing it into an infinite ocean, hoping for it one day to be read.

Graucis’ was a potent mind, but untutored in the nuances of astrotelepathy.

There were too many voices. If he were to live another six hundred years and devote every moment he had left to the task, he could not have hoped to heed them all.

With an effort of will, Graucis leant the metaphysical door to the empyrean closed, and drew his mind back into his own head.

He came to in the meditation chamber aboard the Sword of Dione. He was kneeling on the smooth marble flooring, breathing hard from the attempt at scrying the warp through such a tumult. His eyes were closed, colours swirling across the backs of the lids to the flicker of candlelight. The warp engines thrummed, the agonies of the Sea of Souls as it burned against the Dione’s silvered hull a tremor through his armour-plated knees.

The passage was less turbulent than it had been before his strike against Angron and the Conqueror, but he could still feel the warp’s turmoil. It agitated the old burns from Armageddon and the unhealed wound in his thigh. The latter manifested itself on this occasion as an icy burn that extended a crippling sense of fatigue as far down as his toes.

Graucis took a risk, he knew, sending his mind into the warp while the immaterium remained in a state of such agitation, but he did not expect the seethe to lessen anywhere on this side of the Cicatrix Maledictum. He would find no better conditions anywhere else in Imperium Nihilus. His strike on the Conqueror had bought the Sword of Dione a small lead.

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