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The Last Days of Ector - Extract

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On every world the Crimson Castellans deigned to garrison there was a Crimson Castle. For long stretches of years the castles were mostly empty, as the Crimson Castellans were wont to spread their brothers and their men-at-arms across the worlds they protected. On Ector, Yoth dwelled in the castle alone with his servants. Tonight there was an air of sombre conviviality. The twenty garrison members were together to honour their visiting superiors. They sat to meat in the great hall, which for once did not seem so lonely. Higher ranking serfs ate with the brethren, at the same table, for such was the way of the Chapter. All endured simple fare as the rule of the Crimson Castellans demanded, protein-laced mulch of high nutritious value and little taste. Their singular luxury was their wine, which they
drank from plain granite goblets. Many Chapters sought perfection outside of war in one art or another; however, the Crimson Castellans
chose to be vintners, viticulturists and oenologists. They did little else.

‘A fine vintage, Brother Yoth,’ said Chaplain Gorth.

‘This world is cold, but its soil is rich. The sacred vine fares well here.’

‘It is sweet. Pleasantly so.’

‘The grapes are exposed to the cold to freeze, my Lord Chaplain. It intensifies the sugars.’

Gorth made appreciative noises and signalled to a serf for more.

Yoth saw his chance. ‘Three candidates,’ he said cautiously. ‘It is not many. Fifty years ago we took a dozen from this hive alone.’

Gorth ate another spoonful of mush and swilled it down with Yoth’s wine. ‘The selection gets harder every visit,’ replied Gorth. ‘We can only accept those suitable. Another Chapter may be happy with lesser candidates, but not the Crimson Castellans.’

‘Ector is getting too civilised, lord,’ said Yoth. ‘Governor Hoyel is a good man. I would say unusually efficient. Perhaps we should move on to less peaceful pastures and do our hunting there in future?’

Gorth stared at the rim of his goblet, and Yoth knew then that he had overstepped the mark.

‘Garrison duty is no shameful thing, Brother-Sergeant Yoth,’ said Gorth. ‘Your desire for action is a discredit to your oaths. This world is strategically vital to our efforts in this sector, and your station here a personal favour from Chapter Master Caroman to Governor Hoyel, a man you profess to admire.’

‘You misunderstand my intent…’ began Yoth.

‘This world has proved, and still proves, to be a ground of good recruitment. Tradition and obligation demand we continue our five decennial selections. If we fail to find what we require here, we shall move on to the next world, and then the next, until we have sufficient aspirants, but only when I or Brother-Captain Raankin decree,’ said Gorth tersely. ‘Your motives are suspect, brother. Do you seek personal satisfaction at the expense of your brothers?’

Yoth became deferential. ‘I mean no offence, Lord Chaplain. I simply seek to make conversation. This is a matter that concerns us all. My brothers and I have had little news from the Chapter these last six years.’

‘Idle chatter is the enemy of diligence, Brother-Sergeant Yoth. Your record is exemplary. I am disappointed by your frivolity.’

The castle chamberlain, Meretricion, a young serf of good repute, inclined his head.

‘My lords, I beg your forgiveness but invoke the right of all to speak, full brother or not. I say, let us keep the peace at this time of celebration. Surely now is the time to feast together in gladness?’

Gorth looked at him appraisingly. ‘Perhaps, chamberlain. You do not misspeak, but nor do I.’ He drained his goblet again. ‘Brother-Sergeant Yoth, loose talk is the key by which many a fortress gate is opened. You risk handing entrance freely to the enemy by questioning the wisdom of your superiors. Taciturn and vigilant upon the wall, that is the way of the Crimson Castellans, not this chatter. I will consult with your captain upon my return to the fleet. Perhaps you have remained too long amid others, and it is time for you to go home and reacquaint yourself with our ways.’

‘Thank you, my Lord Chaplain.’

‘It is no boon I give you. Your weakness, not your desire, informs my decision.’

Gorth called to the astropath attached to the Tenth Company, an ancient man who sat some way down the trestle. ‘Hostor Mazurn, astropath prime.’

‘Yes, my lord?’

‘Finish your meal, then be away to inform the Redoubt that we have made our selection. The number of aspirants is eleven in total. We leave tomorrow.’

‘Eleven, my lord?’

‘Eleven. Now be about your duties, astropath prime.’

‘As you wish, Lord Chaplain.’

‘Now, let us heed the words of our wise chamberlain and eat and drink with gladness. The aspirants have spent six hours in meditation. Let us bring them in and allow them their first taste of the grapes of the sacred vine. Their barrel is prepared. Let the initiation begin!’

The Crimson Castellans, dour as they were, cheered and drank another draught.

Hostor Mazurn left the great hall as the ritual got under way. The vile food of the Chapter had been cleared. The aspirants would be fed gallons of wine laced with pseudo-hormones that would initialise their transformation into Space Marines. As a younger man, Mazurn would have regretted missing the celebration, but he was old now, and neither his head nor his stomach – or his bladder, for that matter – were as strong as they used to be.

With relief, then, he headed out from the Crimson Castle and through Hive Luggenhard. Here, the mass of humanity, in such close proximity, made telepathic communication over interstellar ranges nigh on impossible. The density of habitation on all hive worlds necessitated that astropathic stations be isolated as much as possible from the populace, and the regulations of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica stipulated this be so. But the regulations were not always obeyed, and even when they were, the shielding employed was often inadequate. A muddying of message content, and a headache for Mazurn, was the usual outcome. Ector’s planetary governor was diligent in all matters though, and his astropaths had access to several dozen stations of the highest specification. Mazurn set out to the nearest.

The Crimson Castellans were honoured guests, and so Mazurn’s route took him through the loftier parts of the hive. In these places the richer Ectorians lived, although not the richest. Still crammed cheek by jowl, the inhabitants of the upper levels were sleek and well fed, their concerns far removed from mere survival. The hour was late, but hives were round-the-clock societies, and Ector was no different. The snatches of thoughts Mazurn caught as he walked were of conspiracy and intrigue, revolving around the acquisition and display of wealth. He was tired. Being on such a densely populated world was wearing. It had not always been so for him, but age weakened his power even as his skill in using it became more refined.

He felt many fearful eyes on him as he passed. Now and then he sensed the unfocused thoughts of a latent psyker, one not so latent; the fear of discovery was uppermost in their minds. They need not have been afraid, for Mazurn’s gifts did not lie in that direction. He was no sniffer dog for the Inquisition. It was difficult for him to tease the glowing strands of a psyker’s mind from the undifferentiated mess of human souls around him. The crowds parted for him. Not only was he an astropath – and interference with such brought swift death – but he was also a servant of the Space Marines, and so doubly interdicted. A man would have to be insane to harry him.

Mazurn left the core of the hive, where habitats crowded around the geothermal conduits like undersea creatures around volcanic vents, and passed into its middling parts. Here service modules and servants’ quarters were crammed one against the other, oftentimes indistinguishable. The temperature dropped as he went further out. By the time he reached the outer edge of the hive and neared the entrance to the Bridge of Sighs, the air was chill in his lungs, and his flesh goose-bumped.

Two soldiers in gilded armour stood watch either side of the doorway to the bridge. The doors were embossed deeply with the serene face of an astropath, rendered in the geometric styling of the world.

Mazurn was blind, as most astropaths were. He saw none of this directly. He perceived the world through his own precognitive visions, seeing where he would be, rather than seeing where he was. To a lesser degree he could see through the eyes of others. On the one hand, his vision was that of memory, on the other, it was distorted by subjectivity. The picture that came to him was fragmentary at best, but a lifetime’s experience enabled him to stitch together an impression of his surroundings, at once more revealing and yet more dreamlike than true sight.

The guards snapped to attention, laser pikes clicking as they were set upright. Mazurn dipped his head to them. A third man appeared from a hidden closet, although not so hidden to Mazurn’s mind’s eye. With a fur coat draped over his arm, he helped the astropath prime into it, placed a breathing mask over his face and withdrew with a bow.

Mazurn passed into an airlock. When the outer door opened, a cold wind whistled in on whisper-thin air. Mazurn pulled the neck of his robe tight.

A slender pier arched gracefully from the edge of Luggenhard to the station, suspended two hundred metres from the hive’s skin, four thousand metres in the air. At this altitude, Mazurn was high enough to avoid the broil of hydrocarbons that clung to the planet’s equatorial regions. The temperature was astonishing after the warm fug of the hive interior. Ector was a tundra world, on the edge of Valedan’s habitable zone. Even this far south it was cold all year round at ground level, and up this high the thin air was forty below. The coat, issued to him by the Crimson Castellans quartermasters in expectation of such extremity, was extremely warm. Nevertheless, his exposed face chilled rapidly, and he hurried on to the astropathic station as fast as he dared, panting pressurised air through his mask.

The wind buffeted at him. Emptiness surrounded him. The railing and its skull-topped posts were an insubstantial blur in his mind, all that stood between him and certain death. The lack of true sight was something of an advantage here, for he could not see the drop, but a dangerous disadvantage also. His feet slipped every other step. The placing of his staff brought the crunch of ice as much as the dull ring of metal. His ancient joints ached with the cold. The bridge reached its peak, and swept down. Here it passed through the centre of circular psychic baffles arrayed in sequence. The constant pressure of one hundred million people’s thoughts lessened. When he passed through the fourteenth baffle, it cut out altogether.

Two burly men flanked the entrance to the station, clad in cold-weather gear. Their psychic presence was minimal, both having been selected precisely for their lack of talent. By the time the door had responded to Mazurn’s psychic impulse and opened, his lips were blue and he was shivering hard.

It was warm within, the wind’s keening muted but not entirely absent. Occasional stronger gusts shook the station upon its mounts, metal thrumming with the strain.

Mazurn shuddered violently as his coat slipped from his shoulders into the hands of an attentive servant. He ignored the man and stamped his feet, sighing in vibrato as the warmth reclaimed his extremities.

Eager to be about his task and thence to bed, he mounted the stairs to the sending chamber.

There were five couches in the chamber. One was occupied. The astropath mind-sent a short greeting that was barely cordial, Mazurn’s superiority of rank notwithstanding. This other’s business was only beginning, and he left in mind soon after Mazurn had taken his place on a couch.

Mazurn lay back gratefully. Not all sending stations were so comfortable, physically or psychically. He chuckled to himself. When he was undergoing the agony of soul binding, his eyes scorched from his head by the terrifying might of the Emperor, growing old had been the last thing on his mind.

‘And yet here I am,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Here I am.’ He half expected every message he sent to be his last, that his frail body would give out under the demands placed upon it. This conviction grew stronger every day. ‘I have my duty,’ he said. ‘Soon may it be over.’

His private grumble done, he focused, diverting his mind in upon itself. The infinity of worlds that were within every man opened before his eyes.

Mazurn had constructed the bulk of the message on the way. He put his finishing touches to it as he lay upon the couch.

His senses expanded exponentially, rushing out from icy Ector and its Girdle of Steel. The sensation was a close-knit blending of ecstasy and pain, an echo of his long-ago soul binding on Holy Terra. He had learned to bear it. His soul’s own feeble powers shone with greater light thanks to the Lord Emperor, a proud privilege. He absorbed fleeting impressions of the cosmos, chance message fragments coming into the world from other astropaths, the burning tear that was the Vortex of Despair at the edge of the Valedan system, beautiful and deadly, and the echoes of the past and future that issued from it. The raiment of heaven unrolled for him and he thought, for the thousandth time in his long life, that this was a gift worth paying his sight for.

The message bloomed, the mind-sequence he had made. He held in the gaze of his third eye a chequered board of steel and stone, life-size statues carved from red granite upon it. Chaplain Gorth, Master of Recruits Raankin and the twenty Space Marines of the Crimson Castellans garrison ranged behind. In front of them were eleven pawns: identical, faceless boys peeking over the ramparts of miniature castles. Snow drifted onto the metal game board, his own modestly poetic imagining for Ector. His mind played the message, pushing the pieces one at a time away from the board into a metal box cast in the likeness of the Redoubt. The board faded to black, leaving the box to become a living image of the ship, hanging against the steady stars.

He set the message free. He relived being a young boy releasing a bird into the air, this being his message-sending trigger. He watched it go. Satisfied, he began to bring himself from his trance.

Something gave him pause; what exactly, he struggled to define in later years. The rational side of him suggested the highly tuned senses of his subconscious picked up what the upper layers of his mind did not perceive. The mystic in Mazurn, the greater part, perhaps, held that the Emperor Himself worked through him that day – an opinion Chaplain Gorth favoured.

He halted his withdrawal and cast his mind to below the galactic plane. Here, out in the southern reaches of the galaxy, the depth of the galaxy’s wheel was lesser. It was a hard thing for him to see the galaxy as a three-dimensional object; most messages traversed the long laterals across the Imperium. Of course, there was no such thing as direction in the empyrean, where all his messages were cast, but his mind imposed such order. No man can escape his own mind.

The number of messages coming from below the plane and that part of the galaxy referred to as the ‘south’ by men was necessarily fewer than those coming from elsewhere. They were a long way from Terra, but messages there should be. And yet he sensed none.

Mazurn looked further out, grasping for any notice of communication. What he found instead – indeed, what he half suspected he would find – was a great, black wall. Through it he could sense neither the empyrean nor the firefly souls of his fellow psykers shouting their missives into the night. The burning glare of the Astronomican, into which he ordinarily dared not look, was a fitful glow, a fearsome sun with a shroud cast over it.

With a growing sense of dread, Mazurn looked into the dark.

Terror wracked him, an alien horror that tore at the fabric of his being. Mazurn was not to be deterred. He was of a high grade, optimo astropath prime, selected to serve the Adeptus Astartes in the direst of passes. Here was one now.

Defiantly, he dared the horror as long as he could.

Beyond the black wall was something immense and ancient, an out-thrusting of a vast being greater in scope than time itself. It clove the warp as a giant ship cleaves the swell of a sea, imperturbable and sure upon its course. All psychic emanations, of whatever source, were shattered to glints upon its bow wave. A terrible, alien voice smote the heavens, piercing to the core of Mazurn’s psyche. He cast up his mightiest psychic shields, but they were as sandcastles in the tempest.

Before he was overwhelmed, Mazurn’s only instinct was to flee.

And then the wall smothered him, and for a time all was black.

Mazurn came to an hour later. Sticky blood from his nose coated his lips. His head throbbed. With sudden urgency, he pulled himself upright and vomited upon the floor. He gasped as he fought to bring his stomach back under control. At the sound of his retching, the servants came heavy-footed up the stairs. Their exclamations of shock alerted him to the death of the other astropath; he was lolling from the couch, his face contorted with horror.

‘How many adepts in the Chamber of Receiving?’ asked one. Mazurn could not tell the servants apart – his third eye was dazzled. Their identities ran into one another like spilled paints.

‘I… I…’ said a second. Even in his fuddled state, the man’s fear was clear enough to Mazurn.

‘How many?’ shouted the first.

‘Two, two, master,’ said the second. ‘Adepts Fidelius and Tastrac.’

‘What are you waiting for? Check it. Check the Chamber of Receiving now!’

‘Yes, sir, sorry, master.’ Footsteps receded at speed.

Hands took Mazurn’s arms, a soft cloth was pressed to his mouth, wiping his lips, cleaning the blood from his face. The first voice spoke to him softly. ‘Adept? Adept, are you well?’

‘I live, that is enough,’ he managed.

‘What happened, my lord?’

Mazurn ignored the question. ‘Give me a vox,’ he croaked, then, with as much force as he could muster, ‘Give me a vox!’

A heavy handset was pressed into his grasp. With palsied hands Mazurn keyed it on. He accessed the Crimson Castellans more public channels.

‘Lord Chaplain,’ he requested.

Shortly, Gorth responded.

‘Astropath prime? You have sent the message?’

‘Lord…’

‘Have you done your duty?’ Gorth was, as ever, short with him.

‘Of course, my lord. The Redoubt should be en route as we speak. But there is something else we must discuss. There are… complications of a most disturbing nature.’

Gorth caught the tone of Mazurn’s voice. ‘You have company?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Come to me.’

‘My lord, I cannot. Do not command me, I beg of you. I am afflicted.’

There came a pause.

‘You are in an astropathic station?’

‘Station Five, my lord, the closest to our last meeting. I made all haste to deliver your message.’

‘Wait there.’

Gorth’s voice cut out. Spent, Mazurn lay back and allowed the servants to fuss over him. His strength gradually returned, but his soul remained chilled with fear.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Helge C. Balzer.

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