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Fatespinner — Extract

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Fatespinner

Chris Wraight

There were four of them, moving steadily through the tunnels. The two Rubricae went soundlessly, their massive sapphire shells glinting softly in the darkness. Ramon, Sorcerer Lord of the Thousand Sons, snake-crested, gilt, strode between them.

Phaelias, the lesser sorcerer, brought up the rear. As he went, he observed the way his master walked. It was an oddly fluid gait for such an armoured behemoth, almost human.

Though of course Ramon wasn’t human. Neither was Phaelias. ‘Human’ was just a baseline descriptor, one rapidly superseded by both psychic awareness and physical genhancement. The baroque armour they all wore – the fluting, the sigils, the esoteric devices – they were the warning markers, like poisonous animals displaying their toxicity.

‘It is close,’ Phaelias said.

By then they were three kilometres underground and deep into the foundations of hive-spire Gorgantias Magnificens, Rigo V’s principal administrative centre. Far above them, millions of Imperial citizens teemed and bred and mingled, all of them trained from birth to watch out for the xenos, the witch, or the traitor. As a member of Magnus’s endlessly fragmented Legion, Phaelias comfortably ticked two of those boxes, and he felt the clusters of souls keenly, dumbly fearful, locked in their rituals of terror and ignorance.

Ramon angled his serpentine helm. ‘What do you sense?’

Phaelias paused. The dank tunnels dripped around him, hollow with decay. No mortal human had trodden the paths for centuries. Like so much else in their vast, crumbling empire, they had let this place drift out of the margins of memory, left behind like driftwood against an ebb tide that would never return to the flood.

Or maybe they had reasons. Maybe old, old dreams of terror kept them from scratching too far beneath the poisoned soils of their worlds.

‘It knows we are here,’ he said, carefully. ‘It stirs already.’

‘And what does that tell you?’

‘That other ears will hear it,’ said Phaelias. ‘That it places us in danger.’

Ramon nodded. The jewelled tip of his staff swayed in the dark as he moved off again. ‘We are always in danger.’

Phaelias hurried after Ramon. The Rubricae fell into step again, eerily matching their masters’ strides.

‘If it is permitted,’ asked Phaelias, knowing the probable answer but giving it a try nonetheless, ‘what waits for us?’

Ramon was neither a cruel nor a tyrannical master. He had schooled Phaelias fairly and skilfully, generously imparting the more subtle gifts of the Changer of Ways, aiding him in his quest to clamber up the stairway of knowledge. For all that, he had always been close, guarding his secrets just as all the scattered magi of the XV Legion did. They had become a cabal of hoarders and jewel-thieves, nurturing secrets over millennia in the endless hope that one day they would blossom again.

Ramon kept walking.

‘That will become clear,’ he said. ‘For now, please, just follow.’

The slate-grey lander drifted on to the platform like a scrap of stormcloud cut loose from the sky. Once down, its crew bay doors hissed open, revealing five backlit figures within. They moved down the ramp with a swagger, clad in Mark VI battleplate adorned with the marks of their infamously hostile ice world.

Thorskir Helstujrm followed his warriors down, clanging an ironshod staff on to the rockcrete. His armour was as grey as the rest, though adorned with black-edged runes across the ceramite. A glittering psychic hood rose above an un-helmed head, revealing a ruddy, wind-blasted face. Like all Sons of Russ, his jaw was swollen and his eyes were amber.

Waiting for him was a delegation from Gorgantias Magnificens command cadre, dozens of scribes in velvet robes, a hundred honour guard troopers from the governor’s own retinue, and three sentinel walkers standing on the edge of the platform with their weapons lowered deferentially. Incense had been churned out of blowers mounted on the spire’s flank, but the driving winds of Rigo had already dispersed it.

The governor, a tall man in heavy crimson robes, bowed low.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Honour of the Space Marines in 2014
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Adrian Smith.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-535-7

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