You will know what must be done. Arkanasia’s proclamation echoed in his thoughts, a bitter, curdled refrain.
You must know, he told himself. Find the way forward, and stop the losses here.
The terrain at the edges of the tempest was littered with ruined bodies and weapons. Lasrifles had fused with arms. Heads had elongated until they resembled pale serpents. Three Chimeras had become one, sprouting disjointed legs. The front of the lead vehicle had become a gaping maw, and the monster had tried to devour its hindquarters.
Inside the storm, more monsters were being born. For all its fury, the vortex itself was silent, though the screams and roars of the combatants inside were perfectly audible. Some of the voices were still mostly human, consumed by a frenzy of madness and hate. Others were changed, their tones all wrong, as if the beings who cried out had teeth in their throats or mouths on their tongues. Together they created a choir of psychic war, one where the purpose of battle had been lost, and all that remained was the need to destroy.
Arkanasia staggered a few steps down the slope. Her eyes were fixed on the maelstrom. ‘If I voxed them,’ she began. ‘Maybe from here…’
‘There is no one who can hear you in there,’ Malcador told her. ‘Look away, acting governor.’
She did not listen, and kept walking with slow, dragging steps.
‘There is nothing to be salvaged here,’ said Collatinus.
‘Agreed.’ Malcador grimaced. Arkanasia’s project had failed. There might not even be anything to learn from the failure. ‘Begin your assault, shield-captain. We must leave nothing alive.’
Collatinus issued commands, and the Custodian Guard formed a single line. They moved past Arkanasia, their guardian spears pointed towards the tempest. The composite weapons unleashed a stream of bolter fire into the storm. The Custodians were firing blind, but they aimed low, and each warrior swept his bolter-equipped spear back and forth on a narrow arc. The field of fire from the shield company was comprehensive. The barrage would be devastating for anyone caught in its path.
If the Custodian Guard had been firing into a material storm, the battle would have ended in a few short minutes. Malcador did hear new screams as the bolt shells tore into the convulsing, searing shadow. But this was only an opening attack. Space inside the tempest would be erratic, untrustworthy. The shells themselves could easily be transforming. The true attack fell to Malcador.
He edged forward, staying level with the Legio Custodes, gathering his strength. First he had to know his enemy, and to do that, his defences would need to be strong.
Less than ninety metres from the fringes of the storm, he felt he was ready. ‘Hold our position here, shield-captain,’ he said to Collatinus, and he moved to a boulder a few paces away. He climbed on top and, looking past the line of the Custodian Guard, he focused his sight on the storm to the exclusion of all else.
The materium receded to the edge of Malcador’s perception. He reached out for the storm, and the storm reached for him, eager to share its secrets, eager for him to join in its revel. He raised the walls of his will higher, bracing them against the battering of Chaotic waves. He observed from the ramparts of his defences, ready for war, reading the enemy and preparing his counter-attack. There was promise and power in the warp, and he drew on that power, but in the storm, he knew there was no promise. That knowledge reinforced his psychic armour.
There is nothing here for you. There is only destruction, and it must be destroyed in turn.
The barrage from the shield company gave him a way in. The bolt shells brought a violent reality into the nightmare, causing enough damage to create fractures in the storm. Malcador’s consciousness perceived the cracks, and he followed them, holding on to the points of weakness in the tempest, seeking how to pry them open further. The tempest came at him with secrets and whispers. He closed his mind to the whispers, and he chose only the secrets that he needed to fight back.
It reached past him, too, attacking Arkanasia. Malcador was aware of her psychic light and agony as searing blisters at the edge of his focus. She was fighting, but her despair was a crack in her armour. He had to defeat the storm before she became a second threat.
Malcador began to see the contours of the maelstrom. The shape of its psychic winds contained the trace of its history. As cyclones of fury buffeted him, he sought their base, and found the tormented psyche of a human every time. He saw how the storm had come to be. The struggle between the rebels and the loyalists had spiralled out of control. Too many psykers, too close together, had attacked each other with too little thought to discipline and the forces they were unleashing. Order had disintegrated, and identities had begun to flow and merge with the untamed warp. The beliefs that had driven both sides of the conflict no longer existed. What remained were only the impulses that fuelled war for its own sake. Anger, desperation and fear had taken the combatants. The storm fed on their raging psyches, and it amplified their powers. Malcador saw little in the vortex that was remotely human, but there were still presences, cores of things that had been human, and were chained to bodies. The flesh was changing as the immaterium strengthened its grip, but the anchor was there, and gave Malcador his opportunity.
Malcador could bring the fight to what remained of the minds who had created the storm. So he did. The tempest roared around his defences, psychic winds and waves hurling themselves against the isolated promontory of a human who dared project himself into their midst. He held on even more tightly to his walls, because it was in attacking that the great risk would come. The storm would try to make him abandon himself to battle, and so sweep him away.
The materium became the weakest, greyest of frames for the struggle. With an effort, Malcador split his focus precisely in two, between defence and attack, keeping both in balance, strengthening each other. And from his ramparts, he unleashed his own storm, a blast of forked warp lightning, striking multiple targets at once. Mortal nodes of the storm erupted in psychic fire, body and mind burning alike, destruction taking them on one plane and then spreading to the other. Malcador lashed out again, and then again. He was disciplined ferocity. He took the inchoate and gave it form, and his purpose was unshakeable. The things that had been rebels and loyalists died. He took two armies down, a lord of lightning. The vertigo of power came close to catching him, but his defences held fast, and he refused the false promise.
Malcador held fast to purpose and duty, and the storm began to weaken before his assault. Deprived of human fuel, the cyclones evaporated. The broader maelstrom contracted, and the currents became less violent as Malcador destroyed the nodes. Energy flashed, lost coherence and evaporated.
As the tempest retreated, Malcador fought back the new temptations of victory and speed. His discipline and his defences were more important than ever, and he held by them. Even so, he saw the end of the struggle come into view.
Then two things happened. One was real. The other he would doubt for years to come.
Through his gossamer-thin connection to the materium, Malcador saw Arkanasia break into a run. She was shouting something he could not hear. She scrambled past the end of the Custodians’ line, skirted the edge of the barrage and pelted down the slope towards the storm. Psychic charges surrounded her, growing stronger.