The Lords of Silence (Warhammer 40,000) by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight [Wraight, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The two ships come to a full stop and hang in empty space. As they circle slowly, nudged by the last vestiges of momentum, lights pop and spark in the emptiness around them. These are the lights of Neverborn instantiating briefly, like unstable elements created in a laboratorium’s accelerator. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of them before they gutter out again – a mouth, an eye, the curve of a rib.

This is the state of the void now. Dragan does not know if it is the case everywhere, or just in this region. It is both unsettling and intriguing.

The delegation takes a shuttle – a big, cumbersome old hulk with a top-mounted lascannon. It has the name of an old Imperial world, Chattackta, still just about visible on its flanks. They might have chosen to accept the Word Bearers’ offer of a teleport locus, but even Vorx cannot quite bring himself to yield to the warp-meddling of Lorgar’s priest-sorcerers. A ship will do. Then, if the worst should happen, at least they have their own engines and their own guns.

Dragan is combat ready, his body drenched in a hot flush of hyperadrenaline. His power fist rests on his knees, the blades sheathed but poised.

Garstag sits opposite, next to Vorx. Six of the Kardainn make up the rest of the complement. They are all in their bloated and swollen Terminator plate, true giants of slaughter. Dragan wonders if he too will one day don such armour, or whether he will always value the relative mobility of his current protection, the kind he has worn since before the turn. To wear the Kardainn’s colours is to make an irrevocable choice. You do not step back from it again, for that armour will swallow you, mould you, and then consume you. Dragan cannot deny the raw power of it – he has seen Garstag absorb punishment that should have levelled a Dreadnought – but there is always a price.

The older Dragan gets, the more he matures and steeps in the brine of killing, the more he understands that everything is transactional. The gods, the daemons, the magisters of the Imperium, even the empty husk on the Throne, they are all barterers and hucksters, trading a little of this for a soul-full of that. You wish for power? Give me your memories. You wish for strength? I will take your tears.

Vorx would not recognise that picture. The siegemaster thinks of things in older terms, more fundamental verities, and has a pious mind. For all the many pettier disagreements between Dragan and him, that perhaps is the greatest divide.

Dragan turns away to look at the approaching ship. He admires its projected malevolence. Solace, from a distance, looks like a festering liver. This vessel looks like a flayed spinal cord, twitching and vivid. The shuttle glides in across a cityscape of chapels and bone-towers, and he sees iconography hammered onto every surface. The octed is ubiquitous, beaten into iron and nailed to steel. It

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