A shout came over the vox. ‘Wraithbone.’
‘The aeldari?’ Sicarius asked.
Guilliman nodded, but said nothing more. A few minutes later, the last of the vapours ceased roaring from the tunnel and the cutting team emerged encased in ice. It clung in clear sheets to the flat parts of their battleplate, cracking in small showers from their joints, melting and then refreezing around their armour’s heat vents in a steady cycle.
‘There is a tunnel, my lord. Stairs.’ The Space Marine was unsurprised. All of them had seen stranger things than a city hidden in ice.
‘I have an auspex sounding now,’ said Sicarius. ‘There is a building inside this cliff. It is large. We are detecting energy sources, psychic, fusion, more. All theoreticals demand a commander be protected, and I would be preparing myself to escort you, but I have spent enough time in your presence now to know that you will be going alone.’
‘I will,’ said Guilliman. ‘I would thank you not to try to convince me otherwise.’
‘Noted,’ said Sicarius. ‘I will urge you to caution, however.’
‘You do not need to,’ said Roboute Guilliman. ‘It is my greatest fault.’
‘I do not trust the aeldari, my lord. Be on your guard.’
‘Then you are wiser than you look, Captain Sicarius,’ said Guilliman.
With those words he went inside, bowing to navigate the low ceiling of the freshly carved tunnel.
Sicarius arrayed his warriors in a defensive formation outside the entrance and told them to wait.
Rippled ice caught Guilliman’s stablights and refracted them into an eerie glow. Veils of turquoise and aquamarine shifted in the glacial depths, seeming to dance around darker shapes that flowed away to nothing when looked at directly.
The distance to the complex’s entrance was a hundred metres inside the ice sheet. Under such masses of frozen material, there should have been a constant chorus of musical fractures and harmonic growling as the ice moved. Even if entirely inert, as was possible on so small and cold a world, the tunnel should have awoken the ice as the melting forced a redistribution of load, yet there was nothing but hollow, sinister silences.
Guilliman’s hand trailed along the tunnel walls, the cold penetrating through his armour and chilling his fingers. He enjoyed the sensation, as it was directly felt by his own flesh and blood, not mediated by the machine’s sensorium, and that was all too rare a happening.
A soft luminance filled the tunnel from another source, and Guilliman shut off his suit lights. The glow was familiar to him: the lambency of aeldari technology.
His warriors had uncovered a double doorway of sculpted psychoplastic, decorated with simple curves. Despite having been subjected to the full force of melta weaponry, it was unmarked, remaining a pale colour close to bone, though warm with inner life. The doors were only part uncovered. Their shape suggested a pointed archway, but a height only to Guilliman’s head had been exposed. They parted as he approached, opening onto an elegant stairway completely free of ice.
As he ducked through the doors, Guilliman’s armour detected the subtle pressures of an atmospheric retention field, and he paused to unclasp his helm and draw it off. The pressure was exactly equal, the air fresh and spiced with the strange perfumes of aeldari kind. Wraith glow underlit the steps and shone upon a dozen statues arranged in alcoves spaced up the flight. It was as perfect and clean as if the inhabitants had left only moments before, though Guilliman would wager no aeldari had been there for millennia.
Although he did not know exactly where to go, he let his feet carry him forward, and presently he reached his destination.
There was a windowless tower that nevertheless promised the finest of views, if one only knew how to see them. Beneath the soaring cone of the ceiling a lithe figure in black armour and a crescent-shaped helm floated cross-legged in mid-air. He was lit by a shaft of light that began nowhere, and orbited by an interweaving pattern of spinning runes.
Roboute Guilliman met with the one he had called, one of the most powerful beings at large in the galaxy.
‘Greetings, Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of the Aeldari,’ said Guilliman. He spoke in the tongue of Ulthran’s people of Ulthwé.
‘And to you, son of the Emperor of Mankind, my ally, and my enemy.’
‘Enemy I sometimes am to your people, and so I am grateful that you have come,’ said Guilliman. The tower room was well furnished, including a number of chairs. All were far too small for his bulk, and so he remained standing.
‘I expended a great deal of effort in bringing you back to life,’ said Ulthran distantly; his attention was not wholly on the encounter. ‘I would be foolish not to heed your call if you are to fulfil your purpose. All men require guidance from time to time, and for all your father’s art, you are mostly a man.’
‘What is the purpose you have in mind for me?’ asked Guilliman.
‘That is not the question you came to ask, but I will answer it anyway. The task you must fulfil is the one you appointed yourself, that of the saviour of humanity.’ Ulthran looked down. ‘If it would not be offensive to suggest,’ he said, switching to Imperial Gothic, ‘I would prefer to conduct this conversation in your language. You are one of the very few sons of Terra who can speak our tongue at all. You do so very well, but there are certain subtleties you do not manage perfectly, and it grates upon my ears.’
‘I apologise for my lack of expertise,’ said Guilliman.
‘Not at all,’ said Ulthran, staring ahead again. ‘The fault is yours, of course, but one day you will master it. Virtually none of your species, no matter how mighty, ever could nor ever will.’ He caught a rune from the air, examined it and set it in motion again. The rustle of his robes was loud in the city’s immemorial silences.
‘I can feel your discomfort at this new era,’ Eldrad said. His gothic was accented in a way that imbued the language with fresh beauty. ‘I sense your pain. You have a great burden to bear, almost as great as mine. You and I both have seen all we hold dear cast down by folly, and are pained by the misery of what took its place. We are kindred spirits, in a way. Ask your question. I will answer, as a favour, in recognition of our shared sorrows.’
‘You already know what I want to ask.’
‘Ask anyway,’ said Eldrad Ulthran. ‘As you must.’
Guilliman looked away, casting his eyes over the perfectly preserved ghost room he found himself in. He wondered who had lived here, or if anyone ever had. The aeldari were enigmatic, and despite their physical similarities to humanity, were alien of thought.
‘For the last several months I have studied the workings of this armour that I wear, and that I have not removed since it was placed upon my body years ago,’ he said. ‘I believe I understand how it functions, and what it does, broadly speaking. The prophetess Yvraine warned me never to remove it, but I must. What I do not know is whether I will survive its removal.’
‘This is not your famed caution at work,’ said Eldrad Ulthran. ‘That is rashness speaking. Leave it on, if you are afraid.’
‘I am not afraid. I simply lack sufficient understanding to assess the risks. There is a personal element, of course. I have no desire to die again, but I can account for my concern while calculating the probability of my death.’
‘The issue is that you understand full well what the armour does physically for you, but there is another element to it. An element of the spirit.’