Saturnine (The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra Book 4) by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett [Abnett, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2020-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Guelb er Richât

Rules of hospitality

The Opener of the Ways

John descended into the eroded dome.

It was over forty miles across, formed of varying concentric rings of sedimentary rock and quartzite. From the air, it looked like a whirlpool with its circling bands of rhyolite, vegetation and sand. He knew that, because he’d flown above it, several times, years before.

Many years before. It had been her camp then, her retreat. Now, apparently, it had become her permanent home.

Some said it looked like an eye. An eye staring up at the ­heavens. It had been staring for a long time, since the primordial period known as the Cretaceous. The eye had opened long before the rise of man. It had gazed at the sky as man learned to walk. It had sheltered walking man, Homo erectus, in its wadis, and those ­walking men of the Acheulean epoch had left their bones and hand axes in its dust.

It had stared, unblinking, through time, through eras of humid vegetation and creeping glaciation. The land had come to be called Mauritania. That was the name John remembered, at least. Names changed, eroded by time. The descendants of the ancient Sheba and Thamud had named the eye Guelb er Richât.

For so many aeons it had gazed up at nothing but sky and stars. What gazed back at it now? John wondered.

The sky, dipping to evening, had turned reef-water blue. White dust kicked up around his boots like bread flour. He passed the first of the outer markers. Stone idols set on boulders. Pendulous Earth-mothers, full-bellied, and warding fetishes made of bone and twig and straw. John was fairly sure they were cautionary signs and had no power, no magic in them. But there was a good chance they could be wired with sensor-trip systems, or placed to conceal auspex pods.

He drew his pistol. Then he holstered it again. He wanted to be noticed. He wanted to be found and greeted. A drawn weapon would only invite violence.

Ahead, in the bowl of a wadi, he saw a cluster of dwellings. Some rusted habitat pods, half-tented with draped tarpaulins, and large Berber tents were gathered around a central structure. A few small enviro-tents, old and patched, dotted the site. They, and the hab-pods, and the corroded vox-mast poking up above the scraggy thorn and mastic trees, were the only clues that this place was not exactly the way it had been when man first came to the spring that rose here.

He could hear the spring gurgling in its old stone cistern, the dull neck bells of goats grazing on the salt grass.

The central structure was a stone ruin, an earth lodge secured and out-built with carved stone by the ancient Berber people. No, they hadn’t been called that in a long time. Berber was a slur drawn from the Eleniki dead-tongue, barbaros, a word for outsider just like barbarian. What were they called now? Amizigh… ‘free men’. No, that name was probably a long time dead too. Numid? Whatever. The Berber were probably long dead too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.