Fire Warrior

No. The cabin wasn’t the problem. It was what lay beyond. Beyond the corridor striated i

Coiling and billowing, ethereal tentacles caressing the vessel as it churned by, the raw belly of the warp surrounded him on all sides. The empyrean, they called it. Crackling and seething, haunted by shifting, unreal things... It was the “beneath”. It was the “over there”. It was a gap into which entire vessels could be plunged, steered only by the arcane gifts of the frail psychic navigator entombed within the ship’s systems, guided by the radiance of the Astronomican — the Emperor’s dying legacy to the Imperium.

It was Chaos, raw and unfettered, and it made Ardias shiver. To be so close to such malevolence and yet to be completely at its mercy, helpless and insubstantial; it was a feeling distinctly alien to a Space Marine.

So no, today the sleep wouldn’t come. Today his meditations ebbed and shifted, drifting from subject to subject, refusing to allow his muscles to unwind, his tension to ooze away.

But there was more than that. Anxiety alone had never bothered him before, nor did it now. Today there was something else catching on his mind, turning his thoughts away from slumber.

Librarian Delpheus had received a vision. A vision of battle, so he said. A vision of chattering bolters, screaming enemies — the signature disordered order of combat. He’d reported it to Ardias scant hours earlier, moments before the riotous “vessel under way” alarms sounded and the warship slipped with a cold lurch into the warp. The librarian had been vague, clearly shaken by whatever mystical process he’d undergone. Ardias appreciated Delpheus’s work but could never bring himself to envy his old comrade. The psychic mutation was a poisoned chalice, more curse than gift. Still, whatever the details of the vision, the core of Delpheus’s prediction remained the same: action.

After a while, Ardias gave up trying to meditate and prowled his cabin restlessly, uncertain why he should be so eager for combat, but anxious for its arrival nonetheless. The Enduring Blade slid across the warp, ploughing a long furrow through the unseen somethings that gibbered all around it, gathering like mosquitoes around a faint light, raking their mist-like claws across its void shields in ceaseless hunger for the souls within.

There’d been ten other prisoners, in the end.

They’d staggered off into the compound, holding each other up, not sure whether to thank or flee their saviour. Kais had seen the look in their eyes; the way they stared him up and down. One of them — delirious from the pain of his wounds — had even said it. The one, ugly little word they were all thinking as their cell doors rumbled open and he stood there, gifting them with their freedom.

“Mont’au...” the warrior had hissed, feverish eyes staring in fear and uncertainty. The others had shushed him nervously, unwilling to tolerate such blatant sentiment, and limped away into the gloom — towards Y’hol and freedom.

Mont’au. The Terror.

It was a word from the time before the Auns came and preached the tau’va. Before the tribes became castes, before the wars ended and the blood stopped rushing and order came to T’au.

Mont’au was a state-of-being without progress, without unity or altruism, without direction or purpose or strength. There was a purity, he supposed, in its selfishness: a focus upon the “I” before the “we”. And they’d seen it in him.

As he descended the stairs, his HUD automatically adjusting to accommodate the waning light, Kais caught sight of his reflection in a polished illuminator fitting. Suddenly he could understand the captives’ anxieties.

He appeared, in that tiny fish-eyed representation, to be a lurching thing of soot and dust, dappled white and black in equal measure, crusted over by a drying layer of blood. He was a daemon in Fire Warrior armour. He was a ghost of the past, a Mont’au devil, bathing in the blood of his enemies and existing only to kill.

Only he wasn’t; he just looked the part. He took a breath and forced himself to believe it.

A doorway hung open, perpendicular to the stairway. He stepped through, sca

The complex shape caught at his eye and he found himself staring in fascination, trying to decipher the stylised effigy. It seemed to comprise a withered shape, desiccated and frail. He realised with a frown that it was a gue’la figure, almost corpselike in its aspect. Its great papery head — ringed by serried light rays and lightning bolts, hung in limp necrosis, sallow features wrinkled and bloodless. Around and within the skeletal shape was a stylised machine encrusted with yellow and gold mosaic tiles, a rambling arrangement of clustered cables and bound tubing, puncturing and entombing the body, surrounding it in a metallic embrace.

The cadaver’s eyes peered down into the candlelit chapel with a great, hollow sadness, filling the chamber with mournful tension.

Was this their god? he wondered. Was this their Great Emperor, stubbornly hoarding the faith of his teeming flock and preventing their rightful acquiescence to the Greater Good? A rotting, pestilent corpse ruling over his rotting, pestilent empire. Kais fought to contain his revulsion, regarding the statue blankly. They deserved each other.

He raised his rifle and sighted on the pale figure, its very existence a bitter slur upon the efficiency and purity of the tau’va. To even waste an energy bead upon it was damning in its display of his intemperance, but he felt somehow that in obliterating the icon he would be achieving something palpable.

But he couldn’t do it.

The crosshair wandered across the smooth carved lines, full of destructive promise, but every time his finger tightened over the rifle’s trigger, every time he imagined the fragmented pieces of alabaster spi

Somehow, without even bearing a trace of similarity, the abrasive stare of the withered god reminded him of his father, seeing into and through him, exposing his ugliest thoughts. He couldn’t destroy it. He couldn’t even look away from it.

It was almost a relief when a gue’la soldier, hiding nearby, shattered the silence of the chapel in a hail of lasgun bolts and the stink of ionised air.

Kais rolled to the floor instinctively, scrabbling for the cover of a nearby pillar. A second opportunistic salvo from the lurking sniper snapped at his heels, kicking rocky craters in his impromptu shield. An idea formed.

Kais cried out, a scream of pain and fear that no true shas’la would ever articulate, and when the echoes from the sniperfire had died he moaned again, the anguished sob of a crippled, dying warrior.

The gue’la broke cover, chuckling in premature celebration, slouching over to inspect his trophy. The pulseshot pulverised his chest before he knew what was happening, blasting him backwards onto the flagstones with a strangled yelp. Kais silently picked his way back towards the corridor, keeping his back to the statue.

The hallway descended in a snaking series of chambers, each a little darker and more organically cluttered by the rambling, reticulated paraphernalia of gue’la technology than the last. As Kais entered the lowest level of the prison compound his thoughts were a tangle of violence, ancient devils and dark eyes glaring into his soul.