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The Last Hunt – Extract

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Chapter One

MASTER OF CEREMONIES

TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK [TERRAN STANDARD]: 114 HOURS.
TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 69 HOURS.

Temple District, Heavenfall

The Spur of Mankind Descended was hushed. Light flooded through the glassaic dome of the temple primaris, painting the swept flagstones and carved rustwood pews in vibrant shades of blue, green and gold. The air was heavy with dust motes and the silent expectations of threescore dignitaries, sweating in their yat wool gowns and broad-rimmed ceremonial caps. They were seated before the spur itself, tribal hetmen and Administratum adepts alike. Darkand’s ruling elite, come to the slope-city of Heavenfall to observe the onset of the Furnace Season.

The rattle of beads disturbed the expectant silence. Wordlessly the High Enunciator, Septimus Traik, made his way between the pews, head bowed in supplication, features unreadable behind the thousand white beads of his traditional shontii veil. Only Governor Harren turned his head to observe the leader of the Church of the Emperor’s Voice as he passed by. He wondered how Traik could withstand the heat in his impractical garments. Harren’s own ageing flesh was slippery beneath the thick folds of red-dyed yat wool. Like Harren, Traik was an off-worlder, born not on Darkand’s wind-whipped steppes, but amidst the upper-hive grav spires of Soltara. Traik, however, seemed unaffected by the stifling nature of the local garb.

The governor felt Chancellor Tugan, seated next to him, shift and lean in. Unlike Harren or Traik, Tugan was Darkand born and bred, his dusky, weathered skin and stocky build speaking of decades hunting across the steppes beyond Heavenfall’s Founding Wall.

‘A message from Ganzorig,’ the chancellor murmured in the governor’s ear.

‘What is it?’ Harren hissed, fighting the urge to scratch at the sweat sliding its way down his sides. ‘Does he not know it’s Descent Day?’

‘He knows,’ Tugan said, lips so close they almost brushed Harren’s aural augmetics. ‘He says it’s a high priority contact. Code aleph.’

‘Aleph?’ Harren said, voice spiking. One of the Administratum adepts seated in front glanced round.

‘You think it’s…’ Harren began, lowering his tone.

Tugan simply nodded, dark eyes fixed on the governor. He didn’t need to say what had triggered an aleph-level communiqué. It could only be one thing.

They were here, and they were early.

‘Can you deal with it?’ Harren asked. ‘Placate them and brief me in the centrum dominus the moment this foolishness is over?’

‘I can try,’ Tugan said. ‘The warp must have favoured their arrival.’

‘Or they desire more from us than usual,’ Harren said. ‘Don’t keep them waiting. Go.’

Tugan rose from the pews and slipped out of the temple, golden chancellery robes hitched around his ankles. Harren realised that Traik’s stately procession had reached the ceremony’s destination.

The Spur was the rock face that stood in place of one of the temple’s walls. The craggy ochre cliff reached all the way to the wide chamber’s glassaic dome, its natural surface untouched by the masons and artisans that had fashioned the place of worship around it. Its only blemish was at its centre – there the rock had been smashed and shattered, left scarred by plasma burns and blunt-force trauma. The blackened vents and exhaust chutes of a landing shuttle still protruded from the rock, where the craft had buried itself three millennia previously. This was the heart of the Spur of Mankind Descended, the sacred place where humanity had first set foot on Darkand.

Harren approached Traik. The High Enunciator waited beneath the shuttle in silence. The governor had never liked him, or the cultish offshoot of the Ministorum – the Church of the Emperor’s Voice – that had held sway on Darkand since the purging of the Bor-tri cult. Given that he’d only been planetside for eight years Terran standard, Harren had been surprised when the Congregational Ministers had voted unanimously for Traik to take the position of High Enunciator. He was the youngest off-worlder to have ever held the post. This was his first Descent Day.

It was the first Descent Day for all of them, Harren reminded himself. Furnace Season only occurred once a century, when Darkand’s orbit dragged the planet close to the fixed stellar flare listed by the Adeptus Astro-cartograpae as Fury’s Pillar. The climatological phenomenon left nine-tenths of the planet a scorched wasteland and drove the steppe tribes to the polar regions, while the citizens of Darkand’s only fixed habitation centre, Heavenfall, sought shelter in the catacombs that riddled the slope-city’s mountainside. The Furnace Season’s start was heralded by Descent Day, when both tribal representatives and the planet’s off-world Imperial elite came together to ceremonially re-enact the arrival of mankind’s first colonists.

Harren joined Traik, and the two of them mounted the steps to the shuttle’s rear hatch. There was a scrape of rustwood on stone and a scuffling of slipshoe-clad feet as the congregation rose.

The two came to a halt before the closed hatch. Traik raised his hand and splayed his long, pallid digits against the gene-lock pad. There was a whirring sound as the ceramite-plated hatchway slid open. The shuttle’s interior was a lightless depth, the illumination of the temple picking out only a few feet of worn, rusty decking plates. A stench hit Harren, like the gaseous exhalation of a rotting cadaver – void mould, the musk of old rubber and mech lubricants, the sickly sweet stink of long-dead vermin. Despite the heat of his gown, he shivered.

Another few minutes and it would be finished. He only needed to take a few paces into the darkness of the shuttle with Traik and recite the Founding Canticle. The High Enunciator would hold a yellowing, jawless skull – said to have belonged to one of the very first human colonists – for Harren to place his hand upon while he rededicated the planet’s government to the God-Emperor and their forefathers. That, along with a brief ceremonial confession of ritualised sins, and the governor’s part in the Day of Descent would be over. He could re-emerge, ancient tradition observed, and be in the centrum dominus within half an hour.

So why was he hesitating?

Traik shifted next to him. It was a tiny movement, almost lost beneath the heavy folds of his gown, but it sent Harren’s hesitation into flight. He was being ridiculous. Head bowed and robes hitched, he stepped across the threshold and in through the shuttle hatchway.

The stink of the ancient, long-abandoned craft grew worse, and he fought the urge to bring a gold-embroidered sleeve up to his nose. He took another step into the darkness, just far enough to be hidden from the congregation below. Deep enough for three-thousand-year-old shadows to fully embrace him.

He heard a clicking noise, faint and regular. It made him frown. A moment passed before he could place it – it was the sound of the gene-lock pad engaging. He began to turn back towards the hatch just as the noise was replaced by the whirring of the door. The governor caught a split-second glimpse of Traik, still shrouded in his heavy ceremonial gown and veil, looming in the hatchway. Then the door sealed with a crump of locking bars, and Harren was plunged into the lightless depths of the shuttle.

For a moment, he didn’t move. For a moment, he didn’t breathe. For a moment he was angry and confused. He took a step towards the hatch, arms out in the darkness.

Then he heard a slow scraping sound, and the anger and confusion vanished, eaten up by sudden, heart-jolting terror. He wasn’t alone. There was something else in here with him.

His angry words soon turned to screaming.

The Day of Descent was over. The ascent was only just beginning.

The Pinnacle, Heavenfall

The door to the primary vox-hub’s gene-lock read Chancellor Tugan’s palm and slid open to admit him. A government landcar had taken the chancellor from Heavenfall’s temple district to the administrative sector, then a grav-lift up to its central communications station nestled at the very peak of the city’s cliff-like architectural strata. Vox Majoris Ganzorig, a skinny, myopic man, Heavenfall born and raised, met him at the main entrance.

‘They’re on channel eighteen-nine, chancellor,’ the communications chief said as he walked Tugan into the chamber. The room was high-roofed and circular, with six tiered rows of wall gantries lining a central hub filled with brass-rimmed vox-relays and monitoring stations. Though filled with dozens of communications adepts, it was strangely subdued. The staff were all at their workbenches, reports reduced to low murmurs that competed with the fizz and crackle of the vox-horns. Ganzorig took Tugan into a substation sectioned off from the main theatre by more security panels.

This room was smaller, with only six adepts monitoring high-yield arrays. Like all the primary hub staff they were Heavenfall natives, their longer, leaner builds and paler features contrasting with the stocky breeding of the steppe peoples. Even after three decades serving Governor Harren at the heart of Darkand’s government, Ganzorig still felt out of place at the Pinnacle, the nerve centre of Heavenfall’s government. Bar the tribal representatives and steppe lobbyists, almost every non-Imperial member of Darkand’s ruling elite had been born and raised in Heavenfall’s steep, narrow streets. Compared to them Tugan struck a squat, bald figure whose heavy robes hid muscle hardened on the steppes and skin left darkened and cracked by wind and sun. He would never truly fit in with the Heavenfall elite, the mountainside politicos who ruled the planet’s only fixed settlement. That, he suspected, was part of the reason for his appointment as chancellor. Divide and rule; it had ever been the Imperial way.

Ganzorig paused at the door to the smaller substation, one hand pressed against the bulky vox-array that had been grafted into his pale, balding skull. His worn expression grew even more distressed.

‘They’re requesting a direction transmission,’ he told Tugan. ‘Face to face.’

‘We delayed too long,’ Tugan said, his voice grim. ‘It never pays to keep them waiting. Put me on the plate.’

‘Right now?’ Ganzorig asked, hesitating. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes,’ Tugan replied. ‘If we wait for the governor the situation will only worsen. I’ll offer them what assurances I can.’

Ganzorig nodded and gestured to one of his adepts.

‘Activate the transmission plates.’

Tugan paused to check his robes, adjusted the golden yat-horn pin that was his badge of office, and then stepped onto one of the substation’s six hololithic plates. He felt the surface underfoot vibrating up through his slipshoes, and the air filled with a low hum. The lumen strips overhead dimmed.

‘We’ve accepted their transmission request,’ Ganzorig said, hand pressed once more to his vox augmetics as he synthesised the information flow. ‘Codes verified, establishing connection. Stand by, chancellor.’

The hololithic plate opposite his own came online. There was a crack of electrical charge, and the humming grew louder. The space above the plate before him flickered and shifted, pale luminescence filling the darkness. A white phantom materialised, a grainy image washed with pulses of static inference.

It was the ghost of a giant, clad in ethereal battleplate and thick pelts. One great white pauldron was emblazoned with a jagged lightning bolt crest. It wore no helm, and the hololithic projection picked out sharp, proud features and a long, trailing moustache not dissimilar to the one affected by Tugan. Its high cheeks were disfigured by ritual scarring, three lines running down each, slicing towards a strong jaw. Even distorted and flickering, the giant’s eyes had a piercing, hawkish quality, almost cruel. It looked down on Tugan imperiously as the chancellor held out both arms, palms face up and open in the traditional Darkand style of greeting.

‘Hail and well met, Sky Warrior,’ he intoned, fixing his attention on the single eye of the twin-headed Imperial aquila embossed on its vast breastplate.

The giant brought one clenched gauntlet – easily the size of Tugan’s head – up to its breastplate. There was a click as the vox-speakers built into the hololithic plate’s base came online.

‘Well met, Chancellor Shegai Tugan,’ said the giant. Its voice was deep but curiously melodic, lent poetic colour by the thickness of a flowing accent.

Tugan did not question how the Sky Warrior knew his name.

‘I am Joghaten, Master of Blades, Khan-Commander of the White Scars,’ the giant continued. ‘I am accompanied to your system by the entirety of my brotherhood. We have come here with all haste.’

‘The tides of the empyrean have been kind, Great Hetman,’ Tugan said, using the honorific applied by the natives of Darkand to the Sky Warriors. ‘We did not expect your arrival for some time.’

‘Your assumption is wrong,’ Joghaten replied. ‘We are not early. We are late, and grievously so.’

‘I… do not understand,’ Tugan began, hesitating as he tried to process the giant’s words.

‘It is not necessary that you understand,’ Joghaten said. ‘An enemy is coming, a great and terrible xenos threat. My brotherhood’s Zadyin Arga has seen it many times in his entrails and spirit-walks. Your world already feels the tremors of their approach. You must move the nomad tribes inside the capital’s walls.’

‘I will inform Commander Harren of this,’ Tugan said, fear warring with protocol as the enormity of what Joghaten was saying hit home. ‘What manner of xenos? I-I will need authorisation–’

‘Why is Governor Harren not here to treat with me directly?’ Joghaten demanded. ‘Do the White Scars not warrant his attention?’

‘We… we did not expect you so soon, Great Hetman,’ Tugan said, forcing himself to turn back towards the giant. ‘Today is the Day of Descent. He has been called away to the ceremonial start of the Furnace Season. I will fetch him immediately.’

‘Deliver this message to him,’ Joghaten ordered. ‘We are running out of time. You must begin the relocation of the tribespeople to the capital immediately. The Shadow in the Warp will soon be upon us.’

‘The Shadow in the–?’ Tugan asked, trying to force his voice to stay level. He must not dishonour his post by panicking, even if it was in front of a Sky Warrior.

‘You will be fully briefed when we make planetfall,’ Joghaten responded. ‘Go and begin preparations, chancellor.’

Tugan nodded hastily before crossing his arms and bowing his head in a reverent expression of traditional Darkand compliance.

‘As you will it, Great Hetman,’ he said. ‘I shall return as swiftly as possible.’

‘I pray you do, Chancellor Tugan,’ Joghaten said. For a moment the towering ghost form glared down at him, like a hawk eyeing its prey. Then the hololithic flickered, and was gone.

Tugan turned to Ganzorig as the lumens came back on.

‘Issue a code aleph alert to all departments, recall the cabinet and get me the governor. I don’t care if it interrupts the ceremony.’

‘Understood,’ Ganzorig said, signalling to one of his vox operators. ‘Open a secure channel to Commander Harren immediately, maximum priority.’

As the sound of fingers tapping at rune keys echoed through the substation, Ganzorig and Tugan both made for the doors. They never reached them. The hatchway slid open to admit half a dozen Pinnacle Guard in their ochre flak-plate. They were led by Nergüi.

Guardmaster Nergüi, Captain of the Watch, was head of security for Heavenfall’s government district. Like Tugan he was a rare beast, a steppe tribesman inducted into the capital’s inner circle. When seeing the chancellor and the guardmaster together, many assumed the two sons of the steppes shared a sort of native rapport. Nothing could be further from the truth – the two came from rival tribes, the Tug-ai and the Shontaj. Competition was bred into their every encounter.

Tugan paused as Nergüi and his security detail – fully armed and armoured – stepped into the substation.

‘What are you doing here?’ Tugan demanded.

‘There has been a security breach,’ Nergüi said, stopping in front of Tugan, flanked by his men. They wore their helmets’ blast plates down, the fanged images of the steppe canids carved into the visors snarling silently at the chancellor. He noticed that the vox-adepts had also ceased transmitting, the rattle of fingers on rune pads suddenly silenced. They were all staring at him. The hairs on the nape of his neck bristled.

‘What manner of breach?’ he demanded. Ganzorig had started worrying at the collar of his robe, seemingly also unnerved by the sudden appearance of the Pinnacle Guard.

‘Tier one,’ Nergüi said, taking a step forwards and forcing Tugan back.

‘I must speak directly with Commander Harren,’ the chancellor said.

‘The commander is indisposed,’ said Nergüi. ‘He is being introduced to the Master of Ceremonies.’

‘The Sky Warriors are on their way,’ Tugan responded, forcing his voice to remain slow and level as he sought to regain control of the situation. ‘They’ll be here sooner than we anticipated.’

He’d hoped mention of the Sky Warriors would give Nergüi pause. It did not. The man simply smiled, the expression disconcertingly dead.

‘It is as the High Enunciator foresaw,’ he said. ‘Our salvation is finally drawing close.’

The guardmaster turned to his detail and gestured at Tugan.

‘Seize him.’

Tugan went for his concealed Drexian autopistol, but he was too slow. The Pinnacle Guard were on him, pinning his arms at his sides, his ageing muscle no match for their combined, armoured bulk.

‘The vox majoris too,’ Nergüi snarled. Ganzorig was making for one of the hub’s secondary exits, but the staff intercepted him. He didn’t resist.

‘Unhand me,’ Tugan snapped. His heart was pounding, and he strained against his captors. His anger was stoked. Chancellor, minister, councillor, it didn’t matter anymore. Tugan was a son of the steppes, proud and fierce. Whatever treachery was unfolding before him, whatever madness had gripped those around him, he would not surrender to it meekly. He spat at Nergüi.

Nergüi punched him. The blow thumped into Tugan’s gut. He gasped with pain, but the Pinnacle Guard kept him standing.

‘We are the security breach,’ Nergüi sneered, pressing his face against Tugan’s, filling the chancellor’s senses with the stench of rancid yat milk and the greasy reek of weapon oils. Tugan tried to headbutt him, but one of the guards snatched his grey topknot, pinning him back.

Nergüi laughed, and there was nothing but hunger in his black eyes.

‘I have waited a long time to do this,’ the guardmaster said, drawing his kindjal: the long, razored knife all steppe tribesmen carried. ‘Tug-ai scum.’

He thrust the blade into Tugan’s stomach. The chancellor grunted, more with shock than anything else. A part of his mind still refused to accept what was happening.

Then the pain hit. His cry was muffled by a gloved hand as the Pinnacle Guards kept him pinned. Ganzorig’s yelp was also cut short as the vox-adepts struck his head against a transmitter node and began to violently kick him when he went down. They didn’t let up until the vox majoris stopped moving. It took a long time.

Nergüi twisted his blade in Tugan’s stomach, slowly. The chancellor’s robes were red and dripping. Nergüi held Tugan’s gaze as he murdered him, a grin splitting his blunt, dark features. This was not a cold-blooded assassination, not some coolly executed coup. The features of the men and women Tugan and Ganzorig had worked with for years were twisted with a vicious, inhuman mix of raw hatred and vicious glee. There was deep, abiding hunger in their manic gaze. Tugan, breathless with agony and weak from blood loss, could do nothing to break free. The other Pinnacle Guards had drawn their own ceremonial kindjals and were stepping in close, joining Nergüi. Those holding on to the chancellor released him.

Like many before him, Tugan had wondered what thoughts would occupy his mind at the point of death. He had always assumed it would be something relating to the beauty of the steppes, or memories of his family. It was not the steppes he thought of though, as the knives took him on the floor of the vox-hub substation. Nor was it the memory of uncles and sisters, mother and father and cousins. His only thoughts were of terror. Terror at having failed the white-plated giant. Terror at what was coming for his people, for his world, from the depths of the void.

Terror at what was already here, lurking in Heavenfall’s heart.

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