There was an army. A Chaos army—”
The admiral began to thrash and groan, voice muffled behind the gag in his mouth. His face was twisted with revulsion and terror. Severus fixed him with a stare and shook his head.
“Come now, Constantine. You shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Closing your mind is the first step to mundanity, and we can’t have that, can we?
“Now this warhost... This tide of black death, this... this Chaos Undivided... It dragged a net of nightmares across the sector. It toppled a dozen systems, murdered a hundred planets. It spread the Dark Word throughout the Segmentum and doused a hundred cities in blood and plague and stink. It knocked down temples, laughed at the sanctity of Imperial shrines, built statues out of bone and pieces of meat... How does the ancient hymn go? “Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yes, that’s it. Then it reached Dolumar IV.
“Imagine the sight! Black clouds on every horizon! A million shrieking daemon things filling the skies. Drums! Oh, the drums! There were humans, even here. Some forgotten colony, lost since the Age of Apostasy or before, it doesn’t matter. They lasted all of five minutes.
“The warhost ordered their slaves to begin the excavation of a great pit; a Temple Abyss to collect and focus the energies of their Dark Lords. This pit, in fact. Oh yes: it’s still here, all these millennia later. Explorator Carneg stumbled upon the capstone shortly before his... ah... accident. Isn’t it beautiful?”
He spread wide his arms and gloried in the cool darkness of the vast pit, sunlight little more than a distant memory at the top of the shaft.
“To cut a long story short,” he smiled, locking eyes with the deadpan ethereal, “they summoned a daemon. Its name — oh, admiral, shut up!—its name was Tarkh’ax. Beneath the daemonlord’s dominion the warhost went on to greater obscenities, greater carnage, greater Chaos. Nothing could stand against them, and anyone idiotic enough to try was crushed underfoot.
“What’s all this got to do with us? That’s what you’re wondering. Oh, don’t worry, Aun: all will become clear.
“Here’s the thing. Just when Tarkh’ax was at the height of his power, when all the filth of the galaxy was drawn to his banner, when a Black Crusade into the Segmentum Solar seemed unavoidable, the eldar got involved.
“Oh, don’t ask me how or why. Maybe some broad-minded Imperium fop decided that consorting with aliens has benefits over total annihilation. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, how history repeats itself? One way or another the eldar came to Dolumar and began to cause difficulties. They are a shrewd breed; cunning in the extreme and impossible to predict. They harried the warhost and vanished, popping up in strange places. Like ghosts.
“It turns out — and it took me three years of borrowing xenolinguitor servitors to unravel this — that the eldar established quickly that their hopes of annihilating Tarkh’ax and his forces were scant. They opted instead for a sly solution.
“The cartouche they left behind them explains it all, though deciphering its mysteries has cost me much of my life and my fortune. They opened up a sealed pocket of warp-space... part of a ‘webway’, the text says. We can’t even begin to fathom its workings but... I like to think of it as a cage, outside of space and time, cut off even from the warp. They closed off all the exits, detached it from their network of warp tunnels and sealed the gateways behind them.
“The mightiest of their warlocks, commanded by the Farseer Jur Telissa, constructed a ‘songweave’—like a psychic melody, holding it together, stitching the prison closed piece by piece. Out on the plains Tarkh’ax was moments from crushing their forces when the spell was finished and... Hh...A-and every last unit, every daemon and Marine, every warp thing and every warrior in that glorious army — disappeared. The pennants and icons fell. The black heraldry was left to rot, vehicles burning in the deserts. A grim day for the powers in the warp.
“The effort killed almost all the eldar warlocks. Small comfort.”
His lip curled, the unquenchable agonies of his master wracking through his body, filling him with despair.
“Imagine,” he hissed, the sensation too much to bear, “being sealed away for three thousand years, unable to move or think or feel. Cut off from the rage and the power of your gods. Separated by impossible energies from the howling, insane fury of your daemonlord. His cage was — is—the strongest of all.
“It took me three years to discern what those meddling, arrogant xenogen warlocks had done. It has taken me sixteen to work out how to undo it — but I’m close. Oh, terror’s-face, so close! All but one of the prisons are sundered. The army is released. Praise be the Ruinous Ones! Oh, stories can get away with not having a real beginning, gentlemen, but... there’s always an ending.
“Don’t look at me with those disgusted eyes, admiral. You don’t know. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Your... Your ‘order’, your structure... it’s transient. It crumbles. I understand. Given enough time, even the mightiest of endeavours comes to dust. Disorder out of order. You can’t fight nature. And everyone, in their secret souls, knows it. My masters merely seek to speed the process.
“It took me a decade. Hard years of rites and incantations, secretly studied and recited, chipping away at the songweave, crumbling the walls of the prison little by little. And then this... this ‘diplomatic disagreement’. My crowning glory — an orchestrated war. A thousand casualties, and more, all in the name of the daemon-lord!” The governor breathed hard, heart hammering excitedly in his chest. He forced himself to regain his composure and lit a bac-stick from his pocket, inhaling the scented fumes thoughtfully.
“There are rules, you see.” He blew a greasy smoke ring, enjoying the ethereal’s undivided attention on his every movement. “Oh, you stand and chant, you render the dispel icons and arrange the non-weave perfectly. You strike at the monoliths with deconsecrated swords and smear plagueshit across the altars... but you still need a gesture. Sorcery has a high cost, gentlemen. It’s paid in blood and souls and hate.
Thanks to your little conflict, thanks to all those tau killed by human hands — and vice versa — more than enough blood was spilled to fuel the final little act. The walls came tumbling down. I set the army free.
“Let me spell it out to you. I ordered your abduction because I expected reprisals, Aun, not because I value whatever worthless shreds of knowledge you have. I have to admit, mind you, the severity of the counterattack was impressive. Perhaps the tau aren’t entirely useless to the Dark Powers after all. And admiral... Admiral, admiral, admiral. Oh you poor, deluded thing. You really think you had any autonomy throughout this? You think you exercised free choice? I summoned you here, I involved you, stoked up the fire — I even crawled into a librarian’s mind, just to persuade that pompous fool Ardias to intervene. A delightful little peace conference was the only way I could get you both in the same room. All terribly sneaky, don’t you think?
“So the warhost was freed. The webway spat them out like rotten meat — wherever I commanded, of course — and now they’re up there on the surface, flexing their muscles. They’ve been waiting for three thousand years. It would be rude not to allow them some... ha... “venting” time.
“I couldn’t have done it without you. You both have my deepest gratitude. Still. No rest for the wicked, as they say. I have one little job left and then this whole sordid business is done with. One last seal to break. It has to be at sundown, gentlemen. Nineteen minutes past seven pm, by Dolumar’s clock. I checked. That’s three hours from now. Three hours until the last prison crumbles. Three hours until almighty Tarkh’ax — Tarkh’ax the Barbarous; Tarkh’ax the Iniquitor; Tarkh’ax the Defiler!—rises again to finish his holy work... Three hours until all of us — we who’ve done more than any others to bring about the daemonlord’s release — are rewarded for our faith.