It didn’t matter. Immune to vanity, he would not be lured by silken words. The truth was enough, despite the horror of it all.
‘Do I survive this crusade?’ he asked aloud.
Ingethel dragged itself alongside his bootprints, slower now, its breath sawing in and out of heaving lungs.
The Imperial Great Crusade is already over for you. All that remains is to play the role fate offers.
‘No. Not my father’s crusade. The true crusade, yet to come.’
Ah. You fear for your life, if you turn against the Terran Emperor?
Lorgar kept walking, a relentless trudge over the sand dunes. ‘The vision of Magnus said I had suffered in his era. At some point in the coming five decades, I must struggle to survive. It stands to reason that I may die. If you have stared down the paths of possible futures, you must know what is likely to occur.’
Once the betrayal breaks across the galaxy, there are countless moments in which you may meet your end. Some likelier than others.
Lorgar crested another dune, pausing to stare down at yet more endless desert. ‘Tell me how I die.’ He looked at the daemon, fixing it with his gentle glare. ‘You know. I hear it in your voice. So tell me.’
No being may know its future written out before it, in absolute terms. Some decisions will see you almost certainly dead. On a world named Shrike, if you interfere in an argument between Magnus the Red and the brother you name Russ, there is a concordance of possibility that you will be slain in their duel.
‘And?’
If you ever draw a weapon against your brother Corax, in a battle you can never win, you are almost certain to die.
Lorgar laughed at the maddening unlikelihood of it all. ‘You cannot offer me choices I will not have to make for many years.’
The daemon sprayed spit as it growled. Then do not ask questions of the future, fool.
Lorgar had no answer to that, though he found the daemon’s tone amusing. ‘Where are we?’ he said at length. ‘Shanriatha again?’
Yes. Shanriatha. The past or the present, perhaps a possible future. I cannot say.
‘But the air isn’t as cold as the void, here.’
The warp changes all things, in time. Ingethel paused, seeming to sag. Lorgar. You must be aware of the task ahead of you. I cannot remain incarnate for much longer, so hear my words now. In the course of the Emperor’s Great Crusade, you will come to many worlds. Those populated by alien breeds are useless to you. For the next few decades, let your brother primarchs purge those. You have a more solemn duty.
Find the worlds rich in human life. Find those with harvestable populations for your armies, with as little deviation from purestrain humanity as possible. Your Legion is one hundred thousand strong now. Over the next five decades, you must add a thousand warriors each year. For every Legionary to fall, you will replenish your Word Bearers with two more.
He shook his head, still staring out at the sea of dunes. ‘Why have you brought me back here? What lesson is there in this?’
None. I dragged you from Magnus’s chamber with crude force, not guile. It was not my intention to show you this world again. Something else pulled you here. Something very strong.
Lorgar felt his skin crawl at the creature’s tone. ‘Explain yourself.’
Even with its bloody, inhuman face, Ingethel’s worthless eyes were wide in something not far from fear.
You did not believe even the chosen of the pantheon will be allowed to leave the realm of the gods without first passing their tests, did you? It was chosen that the gods would elect one vizier to send, to stand judgement upon you.
The primarch drew his crozius with slow, careful intent. ‘If this is all proceeding as planned, why then do you tremble in fear?’
Because gods are fickle beings, Lorgar, and this was not the plan at all. One of the gods has overstepped the boundary, and violated the accord. It must wish to test you itself.
He swallowed. ‘I do not understand. Which god?’
He heard no answer. Ingethel’s psychic shriek went through him like a blade. For the first time since the maiden on Cadia had become his daemonic guide, he heard the girl within the creature.
She was screaming with it.
NINE
THE UNBOUND
THE SOUND BEGAN as the promise of thunder. Lorgar raised his head just as the tortured sky went black.
A gargoyle shape cast darkness across the clouded heavens, blasting wind downward from its beating wings. He saw it descending in a graceless spiral but, despite his eye lenses tinting to reduce the greasy glare of warp space, he could make out little detail in the figure’s form.
It struck the ground a hundred metres distant, sending up a vast spray of powdery sand. The ground shuddered beneath Lorgar’s feet; stabilisers in his armour’s knee joints clicked and thrummed harder to compensate for the quake.
Its wings rose first – huge, bestial black wings, the membranes between the muscles and bones as tough as old leather, cobwebbed by thick, pulsing veins. Scarred fur coated much of its body, while the rest of its bunched musculature was encased in great brass armour plating. Its horned head defied easy description – to Lorgar it resembled nothing but the malicious features of Old Terran’s greatest devil-spirit, the Seytan, as seen in some of the oldest scrolls. It did more than tower over any mortal man – it stood above them as a colossus. Its fists, each the size of a Legionary, gripped two weapons: the first, a lashing whip that thrashed of its own accord, sidewinding across the sands; and the second, an immense axe of beaten brass, its surfaces encrusted with dense metal runic scripture.
It stalked from the crater it had made, each fall of its armoured hooves sending tremors through the world’s surface.
The targeting reticules and streams of biological data across Lorgar’s retinal displays offered no insight at all. One moment they listed details in a runic language the primarch had never learned. The next they told him nothing was there.
When he spoke, his voice was a breathless exhalation, crackling through the lowest frequency of his helm’s vox-grille.
‘What, in my father’s name, is that…’
Ingethel had slithered away while Lorgar stood rapt, yet it still heard his voice. Hunched upon itself, doubled over and leaking fluids from every orifice on its head, the daemon’s psychic sending was a weak stroke.
The Guardian of the Throne of Skulls. The Deathbringer. Lord of Bloodthirsters. First of Kharnath’s Children. The Avatar of War Given Form. In the mortal realm, it will come to be known as An’ggrath the Unbound.
It is the revered champion of the Blood God, Lorgar. And it has come to kill you.
He opened his mouth to reply, but all sound was stolen in a tempest of breath as the creature roared. The scream was loud enough to disrupt the electronics in the primarch’s helm, causing his aural intakes and retinal displays to crackle with static. Lorgar tore the helmet free, choosing to breathe the thin air over fighting deaf and blind.
His lungs reacted immediately, clenching like twin cores within his chest. The granite-grey helm fell to the sand by his boots. Fear didn’t clutch at him, the way it would a mortal. He feared nothing but failure. Defiant irritation set his skin crawling, that the deities would test him this way. After all he had endured. After being the one soul to seek the truth.
Now this.
Lorgar raised his maul, activating the generator in the haft. A rippling energy field bloomed around the weapon’s spiked orb head, hissing and spitting in the wind. Sparks streamed away from its spines, like halogen rain.