“And the ethereal?”
“A faint reading, but it’s definitely him.”
“East, you say?”
“Correct. Go with the tau’va, Shas’el.”
There was a reckoning coming. Kais gritted his teeth and stared ahead to the jagged spinal-chord of the mountains on the horizon.
Ardias said... Ardias said he knew where to find the enemy base. He said he was taking them there.
He said he’d wipe away this man, “Severus’, and end the madness and that Kais, if he had to, could tag along.
He said he’d kill him if he got in his way. Kais was inclined to believe him.
The tight-skinned concentration of the Marine’s features, hawkish face scarred and frozen in a permanent frown of martial intensity, filled Kais with a strange sort of assurance. So little in his world now seemed reliable, but to even question this man’s metal-clad resolve was unthinkable. The human’s focus, despite being bent upon conflict and triumph rather than unity and equilibrium, was equal to any that he’d encountered in members of the tau race.
Unity and Equilibrium and Progress and Growth...
Important words. Tenets of faith.
Ardias said... Ardias said faith would sustain him. Ardias said faith was the only shield Chaos couldn’t penetrate.
Kais plucked the display wafer from his pocket — too exhausted and bloodied to care about exposing the tiny rectangle of words that he was so careful to conceal. The jagged characters were like old friends — or enemies, perhaps — each line and curving inflection as familiar as his own face.
It began: My son. Somehow the familiarity of the phrase went against Kais’s ingrained impression of his father, as if to even accept such a base thing as having a flesh relative was below the idealistic grandeur Shi’ur had espoused in life.
Then four lines of text:
No expansion without equilibrium.
No conquest without control.
Pursue success in serenity
And service to the tau’va.
Military and focused and balanced and graceful, everything a Fire Warrior should be. Elegant but not excessive. Ambitious but moderated by knowledge of one’s limitations. It was efficient.
Below it, nestled beneath the freeform meditation like a thorn hidden within a perfect petal, the display wafer said: With pride.
Kais told himself: Don’t think about it. Not now.
Don’t think about the eyes. The big, dark eyes. Overshadowed by straight-edged brows, framed by sweeping cheek bones and underscored, like a grammatical emphasis, by the rule-straight gash of his mouth.
Don’t think about the disappointment. Don’t think about the silence of the battledome all those tau’cyrs ago as that diamond-tipped gaze, so full of disenchanted melancholia, regarded you and skewered you and made you bleed inside.
Don’t think about his words.
His dedication to the tau’va is commendable, I daresay? He excels?
Don’t think about the shas’vre, stammering for a dignified response when all he wanted to say was: “No. He struggles. He has no place here.”
Don’t think about O’Shi’ur at all. Think of something else.
Don’t think about never having had the chance to prove to him — to show him, for all time — that yes, I am your son! I am worthy of your blood!
Don’t think about him dying, battlesuit shredded by tyranid talons, body exposed and bleeding — like a curled limpet prised apart by a resourceful carrion crow. Don’t think about him dying in the sure and certain knowledge that his son — his one hope of lasting legacy, his one gift to the machine that would last beyond the passing of his own self — was flawed.
Don’t think about it!
“What’s that?” The Space Marine’s voice was like granite, exploding apart his reverie. He realised he was clutching the wafer so tight one corner was cracking, twisting the words with fluid amorphousness. Twisting the last piece of purity in his world, just as everything before it had crumbled or corrupted or faltered.
“Nothing,” he said, words strained. “Nothing you’d understand.”
“Hm.”
The silence, if one could call it that, resumed. Beyond sighing at the asthmatic spluttering of the vehicle’s engine and grunting at the occasional roar of friction as the nose dipped to grind against the desert shale, neither said a word. Ardias piloted the craft with unwavering absorption and Kais wondered vaguely, relieved to be distracted from the clamour of guilt and rage bubbling just below the surface of his mind, if the Marine, like him, was trawling through his memories for some way of explaining this rotaa’s insanity.
Nothing would come. Nothing had prepared him for this.
Combat itself had been a poisoned chalice: an intoxicating blend of fears and violences; at first terrifying and new, then dizzying and joyful and then, finally, regaining something of its terror at the realisation of that same joy.
It was like discovering he had a talent for murder.
It was like finding out he was a skilled butcher.
It was like coming to terms with a natural enjoyment of horror.
It was like—
Except... Except it wasn’t “like” any of those things.
He did have a talent for murder. He was a skilled butcher.
He did enjoy the horror and the carnage and the violence. The tau’va had never prepared him for that. The display wafer in his hand was laughing at him (the Mont’au devil said so, and hadn’t it served him well before?).
The insanity crawled along his spine and into his mouth and said:
Haven’t we been triumphant?
Haven’t I saved you and gloried in you and made you a hero?
Haven’t I guided you just when you needed me?
Haven’t I made you excel, just like you always wanted?
It said:
What would you do, Shas’la T’au Kais? What would you say if the old man, the old general, the old tired morsel of gristle and flesh with his imperious eyes and his holier-than-thou sneer, was here now?
What would you say to your father, little Fire Warrior?
Kais curled his knuckles around the display wafer and slowly, enjoying every rai’kan, cracked it into two jagged pieces.
If Ardias noticed he gave no indication, angling the speeder towards the humped shadows of the evening hills and extending a finger.
“There,” he said.
Over the next rise, depressed into the ground like a mighty bullet wound with jagged rock edges and black obelisks standing guard over its depths, a pit opened up into the guts of the world. A mighty disc of rock, covered in the spidery etchings of some ancient, alien hand, lay crumbled and discarded nearby. Walkways and ramps wove downwards from the surface, vanishing along tunnels that wormed their way into the exposed soil like arteries.
“I’m ready,” Kais said, more to himself than the Space Marine.
The land speeder slowed to a spasmodic halt and the two warriors stepped out onto the sand.
The Mont’au devil unsheathed its claws and prepared itself for the end.
The seven-pointed star throbbed hungrily, daemonic light racing along its vertices, creaking like a melting iceberg. Severus allowed the energy to build within his soul, a cinder point of heat that quickly grew to needle-sharp intensity. He resisted the urge to cry out.
The chanting reached its crescendo, rising to a chorus of resonant voices. Briefly the disjointed mantras of each chaos priest overlapped and reflected one another, lifting to a natural zenith. The floor of the temple pit radiated a sickly light, illuminating the four compass point shrines set at each corner.
One for each god of the major Chaos Arcana.
Nurgle.