The Kharne cocked his head, as if reconsidering something he already knew. ‘Say, rather, that others are ambitious on his behalf.’
‘Lord, what is it you are saying?’ Jonah asked quietly.
The Chapter Master checked, and looked his captain square in the face.
‘It may be this is a raid, no more. But the Kargad System is four months away.’
‘Not if one has recourse to the warp–’
‘The warp is fickle at best, and Isa Garakis has not travelled it in a long time. The Eye of Terror is waxing, we hear, and the warp is in flux. Half a dozen ships have been lost to it without a trace in the last year alone – an Imperial transport convoy with an entire Guards Regiment aboard is ten months overdue to Wendakhen.’
‘You do not trust our senior navigator?’
‘Say rather that in the current conditions, I will not trust to the warp.’
‘Four months! Lord, they could conquer half the system in that time, and be well entrenched by the time we arrive.’
‘Better than you not arriving at all, Jonah.’
As he saw the embattled frown upon his captain’s face, Al Murzim set one fleshless hand upon his shoulder again.
‘If we were at full strength, with a fleet worthy of the name, then I would send you into the warp. But I will not risk the loss of an entire battle company for the sake of a few months; nor will I risk losing you. The Chapter cannot afford that gamble.’
He paused. ‘One day, Jonah, I look to see you standing where I stand now.’
Jonah was stunned. ‘I am in no way worthy,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Oh, but you are.’ Al Murzim smiled. ‘And besides, there is no one else to whom I would trust this brotherhood, were it up to me alone.’
‘It – it is not up to you alone.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Parrik–’ It had been a long time since Jonah Kerne had called his Chapter Master by that name. Not many in the Chapter even knew what their lord’s name was, beyond the title. But Kerne had known Al Murzim in the long-ago days when they had both been young.
‘There is no call to begin talking about your successor.’
‘One never knows, Brother Kerne.’ The Kharne seemed uncomfortable, irritated even, at hearing the name he had been known under when he had been merely another battle-brother.
‘Forgive me. I am overfamiliar.’
‘No, not you. But times have changed, Jonah. There are undercurrents in the senior command that I have not quite fathomed.’ The Kharne collected himself, frowning. ‘This is not your concern, at any rate. That last message from Cypra Mundi is.’
Then Kerne looked up. ‘Then you are sending me. You are sending out Mortai.’
‘I am. Can you guess why?’
‘I–’ Kerne hesitated. He thought he knew, but he was not sure he should say it.
‘Because you are the best strategist of all my captains. That’s one thing. And because you work best without supervision. That’s another. Others will say that I send you out of sentiment, my old company that I led for a century and which I still indulge from time to time.
‘Well, there may be something in that too. But you will not go alone. I will attach some heavy weapons from the Ninth, and Ambros will provide you with Scouts. It will be good for the Haradai to learn some new tricks at your hands.’
Jonah Kerne bowed, and on straightening said: ‘My Kharne, you say this has the hallmarks of a raid. What if it is more?’
The Chapter Master’s long face closed, until it resembled that of his granite-hewn forbears in the shadows around them.
‘That is the final reason why I send Mortai, and not one of the other companies. Because I know that it is like its current captain – awkward, stubborn, and full of anger. Mortai Company gained its title long before you and I were born, but its character has endured.
‘If things go ill – if this is more than a mere raid – then you will send us word, and we will come to you. And in the meantime you and Mortai will endure, Jonah. Your people will hold their ground against the Great Enemy until we prevail once more. There is no other company in the Chapter that I trust more.’
Al Murzim stopped and looked across the austere vastness of the chamber. His gaze came to rest upon the statue named Lukullus. Then he raised his head and stared up at the opening in the great dome above. It was dark outside now, and the wind could be heard, a distant howling. Snow whirled in and vanished before it was halfway to the floor. In the red lights of the votive candles it looked like slowly falling blood.
‘It is for this and times like it that our kind were brought into being, brother.’
Jonah Kerne knelt before his Chapter Master and bowed his shaven head. ‘Lord, we will do your bidding, or we will die trying.’
Kharne Al Murzim raised up his captain and took his arm in the ancient warrior grip, cold steel and warm flesh meeting.
‘Umbra Sumus,’ the Chapter Master said.
‘Umbra Sumus,’ Jonah replied. And his black eyes gleamed bright.
TWO
Praeparatio
Darkness had come to Phobian, and the icefields and glaciers were blue under the pitiless stars.
High up in the savage peaks of the Argahasts, however, the shadows of the Dark Planet were rent asunder by clusters of magnesium-bright light. The fortress of Mors Angnar was come to life. It pulsed and rumbled and thundered until it seemed that the very roots of the mountains were set in tremor by subterranean activity.
The vibrations triggered a dozen great avalanches downslope, filling whole valleys. It was as though some buried god were struggling to wake from sleep.
The servitors had been labouring in their hundreds all through the night. For the first time in years the vault doors of the Arsenal had been thrown open wide enough for vehicles, and now heavy wheeled and tracked transports were thundering up and down the concentric access ramps to the deepest ammunition stores of the Chapter.
Outside, the landing fields were being bulldozed clear of snow and ice to allow the heavy shuttles of the fleet to land. These pads had been built into the very mountainside of Anghir-Adhon itself, the sheer-sided peak which formed the spine of the Dark Hunters fortress. They projected out like flat-topped fungi protruding from the trunk of a mighty tree.
Normally the inbuilt heating systems of the landing-pads would keep them clear, but at certain times of the year even they could not keep pace with the accumulation of ice and snow, and so the weariless servitors would man the dozers and attack the drifts, shunting them off so that hundreds of tons of frozen rock and frost-cemented snow tumbled to the valley three thousand metres below.
Already, in the gaps between the whipping clouds, stars brighter than nature were glittering and wheeling above the mountain; the heavy shuttles of the fleet circling in holding patterns high above, impatient to land.
Mortai Company’s first sergeant breathed the gelid air deep into his massive chest. Brother-Sergeant Fornix was dressed informally in the fur-trimmed hides many of the Dark Hunters donned when outdoors on their home world.
He had a long, narrow face with a beak-like nose. One eye glinted pale as a frosted stone. The other gleamed dull red, the ocular buried in a fist of scar-tissue. His black hair was shorn close to the scalp except where one lock had been grown long to dangle plaited in front of his right ear.
Only a few long-serving veterans of the Dark Hunters wore the scalp-lock which was a legacy of their savage Primarch, Jaghatai. It was considered old-fashioned, a throwback to forgotten times, like the ritualistic scarring which had all but died out in the Chapter in the last century.
The reinforced plascrete of the landing field quivered under the thunder of the heavy transports; and now something more, also. A giant stumped up behind Fornix, a five-metre automaton as broad as it was tall, steam billowing from twin exhausts on its back, and the gyros of its mighty arms and clawed hands whirring. Fornix turned and smiled at the monster.