Renegades of the Dark Millennium by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Corpse Road

Graham McNeill

Now it is the time of night,

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite

In the corpse-road paths to glide.

This far from Terra, the light of the Astronomican was little more than a spot of distant illumination. The Eastern Fringe was at the farthest extent of the Emperor’s Light, enough to guide a ship, but not much more.

The swirling warp light beyond the segmented, crystalflex blister in which Tolvan reclined was a whorl of unnameable colours and emotions rendered in unlight.

A window into madness for most mortals, quotidian to a Navigator.

Tolvan had once plied the ebbs and swells of Segmentum Solar, where the Astronomican’s radiance was so blinding, so pure, that he could steer a ship’s course even with his third eye concealed.

And no matter how many times the House Novators reminded Tolvan that it was an honour to be seconded to Ultramar, this current duty didn’t feel much like an honour.

The Shendao was an old ship, even by the standards of the Imperium, where vessels might serve for tens of thousands of years. Its bones were tired, groaning and creaking with each manoeuvre. Its soul was cantankerous, its hull pitted with micro-impacts from millennia of dust carried by celestial winds. The fleets of Ultramar comprised many great and noble vessels, but the Shendao wasn’t one of them.

It was a corpse-hauler, a vast transloader with a hundred vaulted holds filled with the dead, stacked high in chilled cryo-holds.

The war against the daemon lord’s Bloodborn army had seen untold billions die, men and women of the Defence Auxilia, civilians and Adeptus Astartes.

The Space Marines would be interred upon Macragge, and some of the mortal dead had been returned to lie in the crypts of their ancestors. But many more had no one to claim them.

Those bodies travelled the Corpse Road to Nakilla.

The cemetery world lay just beyond the edge of Ultramarian space, across the liminal border that separated the living from the dead. An ancient superstition of betwixt and between, but one the passage of millennia had failed to erase.

The warp was restive in the wake of the war’s ending, and Tolvan was having to hold fast to the Astronomican’s light. Vicious swirls of purple-red anger roared hard against shoals of grey grief, and veils of sickly yellow hopelessness bled into everything. Tolvan ignored the torrents of weeping faces that formed and dissipated in the void. Phantoms all, but no less potent for that.

His spider-like fingers drifted across the brass dials and rheostatic levers of his Astrolabe Ephemeris, sending course corrections to Captain Matang on the bridge. The jump from Calth’s Mandeville Point to Nakilla was a relatively short one, but still required his total concentration.

To be lost in the warp aboard a ship full of corpses had all the makings of a scare story told around low-burning fires, and Tolvan had no wish to be part of such a tale.

He exhaled slowly, gently nudging the Ephemeris, and cursed as he heard a hiss of pressurised air.

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