CH. 3 - Ashkarran

The Ashkarran system greets us the way a haunted house greets guests: all the lights on, and nobody home.

The Wyrmslayer falls out of the Warp at the system's edge with her guns already run out, because Space Wolves do not knock. What the guns find is an amber star, nine worlds, and silence with furniture in it. The outer planets are mining stock — cracked moons, ice giants ringed with extraction platforms — and every platform's beacon is lit and transmitting and wrong. Not dead air. Worse than dead air: routine traffic from years ago, playing back. Shift-change klaxons for shifts that no longer exist. The defence grid around the fourth world — two thousand years of accumulated star-forts and gun platforms — answers our hails the way a man talks in his sleep: hymn-fragments, dockyard chatter, one station repeating the same fire-drill announcement on a loop that its own logs say has been running for eleven weeks.

The outer listening post doesn't answer at all, so Bjarn takes a boarding party across.

He finds it empty. Not slaughtered — empty. Bunks made. Meals half-eaten and mummified. Every chrono aboard stopped at the same second, and a hole in the station's heart where the reactor used to be, cut out so cleanly the deck shines like a mirror where the cut passed through.

"No bodies, no blood, no breach," Bjarn reports, and for once there is no verse in him at all. "The crew didn't leave, Lord. They were subtracted."

We run in-system towards the fourth world with the guns kept run out the whole way.

The war-council convenes that night in the strategium — which is a feast-hall with a map in it, as far as I can tell, and I have stopped expecting otherwise.

Ashkarran turns above the table in grainy hololight: a hive world half again Terra's girth, a heavy-grav brute wrapped in ash-storms, one surviving hive cluster glowing on its northern shield-plateau like an ember that refuses to go out.

"Twelve billion souls," Ulvar Stormbrand says. "Was forty, once. Ashkarran is a world that does not die when it's told to." A thick finger stabs into the hololith. "Greenskins came, eight hundred years back — a WAAAGH! big enough to crack the southern hives, and it did. Then it stopped. Broke apart overnight, mid-conquest, warbosses dead in their camps. The Imperium called it deliverance. Two centuries later a splinter of the Great Devourer made planetfall on the eastern continent, ate two hives to the bedrock — and stopped. Whole swarm-fronts found mineralised. Fused. Like insects in amber."

"Twice-Shielded," rumbles Hakon, from the shadows. "That's what the Ecclesiarchy named the place. They have a saint for it and everything. Saint Averil, who prayed the Devourer to stone."

"And now," says Ulvar, "the miracle is misbehaving."

The pict-captures crawl past. Manufactorum machine-spirits speaking in unison at midnight, in no language the enginseers know. Servitors walking off assembly lines in perfect lockstep, out of the hive gates, into the ash, in straight lines — great-circle straight, geodesic straight, the kind of straight nothing living walks. Quakes in patterns. And auroras where auroras have no business being, hanging over the equatorial deadlands where both invasions went to die.

Green auroras. Cold, patient green.

Something about the hue itches at the back of my skull. Familiar the way a smell is familiar — from somewhere, from nowhere, gone when I reach for it. I don't reach twice. There is enough on that hololith without borrowing trouble from my own head.

The council argues method, because Wolves argue the way other men breathe. Bjarn wants the head of the thing — find whatever commands the waking and kill it in its bed before it finishes stretching. One of the pack leaders wants the deadlands cracked open from orbit now, tonight, while whatever is down there is still drowsy. Hakon wants the twelve billion talked about before anyone talks about anything else.

"Templar."

Ulvar is looking at me. So, I realise, is the whole table.

"You've an opinion," the Wolf Lord says. "Out with it."

I hadn't spoken. I hadn't moved, so far as I know. I make a note that whatever my face was doing while grown warriors debated waiting, I should confess it to someone eventually, and I choose my words the way a man crosses a frozen river.

"My Chapter's way is not the only way," I say. "But you asked. We would already be falling. Vows sworn on the drop-ramps, fire on the deadlands before the sun rose — we do not let the dead finish waking, lord, and we do not share a roof with them while we deliberate." I incline my head, gorget stiff. "Your campaign. Your judgment. I'll fight it your way and be glad of it."

"Hn," says Ulvar, which I have learned can mean anything.

"He'd have made a Blood Claw," someone offers, from down the table, and the laughter takes the edge off the room — which, I suspect, is why Ulvar asked me at all.

The shipmaster's vox-chime interrupts whatever came next.

"Lord — auspex returns from the deadlands. Deep seismics. Regular. Repeating. Magos Ferrin says the pattern resembles machinery achieving operating temperature. She says the resemblance is not approximate." A pause, the kind that makes a room lean in. "And there are two of them. Two sources — equatorial deadlands and the far southern pole. Different pulse-rates. Different rhythms entirely."

On the hololith, some helpful cogitator paints the two seismic songs as waveforms, side by side. They don't match. They don't even try to match — different tempo, different structure, like two anthems in two keys.

"Two tombs," says Hakon Iron-Tooth into the quiet, saying the word everyone is chewing on. "Waking out of step."

"Or two houses," says a voice from the strategium door, and this is how I meet the witch.

He's called Ottar. Rune Priest — which I am given to understand is what the Wolves name their Librarians, when they bother naming them anything printable — a lean grey-bearded storm of a man hung with talismans, bones, and knotted cords, eyes the colour of weather. He walks into the strategium mid-council like weather too, and the council makes room the way men make room for weather.

Every hair on my neck stands up. Two hundred years of Chapter doctrine stand up with it. My Chapter does not suffer the witch — no Librarians, not in ten thousand years, not one; it is the oldest of our vows and we have bled for it on worlds beyond counting — and here is a witch in wolf-charms reading the campaign map of the war I am about to fight in.

"The dead down there dream loudly," Ottar says, to Ulvar, as if continuing a conversation. "Two dreams. They do not like each other." Then, without turning: "Your spine is very straight, Templar."

"My Chapter has a vow concerning your kind," I say. Evenly, I think. Almost evenly.

"Aye. The Wolves have heard of it." He turns, and the weather-coloured eyes take me apart and reassemble me, and there's neither malice nor apology anywhere in the process. "Here's mine: I dream true, I sing the storm, and I have kept this pack's souls from the maw for three hundred years. You'll fight beside me or you'll fight badly, son of Dorn. The dead below don't care which of us is holy."

"Enough," Ulvar says, mild as an avalanche choosing not to fall yet. "Templar. Your vow is your vow; no one here will make you pray with him. But he sails with us, and you sail with us, and Ashkarran will need every blade regardless of what the blade thinks of the arm beside it. Can you hold that line?"

Every eye in the strategium. The vial is against my chest — I've taken to carrying it in a socketed reliquary the Iron Priests welded to my plastron, chained, because some things you do not leave in a cell — and I think of forty-one brothers, and one seed, and a vow that just gets longer.

"I held a line missing half my body," I say. "I'll hold this one."

Ketil, from somewhere in the back: "Verse material." Someone cuffs him.

On the way back to my cell I pass through the tooth-hall, and — I am not proud of this — I stop at the wraithbone sliver in its unlabelled case, and I listen.

It's humming. Louder than it was. As if something about where we're going has its attention.

I tell myself xenos bone-song is not my problem this campaign, and I very nearly believe it.

We make orbit over the northern hive cluster on the fourth day, and I get my first true look at the war we've sailed into.

From orbit, Ashkarran is a scarred giant. You can read its whole martyrdom from up here like scripture: the southern hemisphere studded with the cracked husks of the hives the orks broke, each one a burst skull of rockcrete a thousand storeys tall, ash drifted against them in dune-seas. The eastern continent is worse — a plain of grey-white glass where the Devourer fed and then, mid-feast, became stone. They call it the Amber Shore. From four hundred kilometres up it glitters, and the glitter has shapes in it, and I stop using the magnoculars after a while, because the shapes are swarm-fronts, frozen mid-charge, a hundred kilometres of teeth turned to mineral in a single arrested heartbeat.

Deliverance. Twice.

I was raised on miracle stories. I have kissed reliquaries on a dozen shrine worlds and believed — still believe — in the God-Emperor's hand at work among men. So it costs me something to look down at the Amber Shore and think what I am thinking, which is: miracles do not have a favourite continent. Both invasions died where they stood. Both died fast. Both died precisely at the threshold of the equatorial deadlands, as if they had wandered onto something's doorstep — and been removed, the way a groundskeeper removes weeds, with no more hatred than that.

Something under Ashkarran defended its house twice, and twelve billion people built a saint on top of it.

We drop that night. Not to war — not yet — but to parley with what remains of Ashkarran's masters: the Lord-Governor, the Cardinal of the Twice-Shielded, whatever passes for a defence council on a world whose miracle is waking up underneath it. The gunship falls through ash-storm the whole way down, and when the ramp opens the planet's grip closes on us like a fist — half again Terra's pull, a gravity that makes mortals walk old and Astartes walk mortal.

Every Wolf on the ramp settles, adjusts, compensates — flesh recalculating flesh.

I step out onto Ashkarran, and my iron legs drink the weight like it's nothing at all. No burn. No tiring. No flinch. For the first time since Hakon rebuilt me, I am the steadiest thing on the field.

"Now that," Bjarn says behind me, wounded, "is simply unfair."

Hive Karsala rises out of the storm ahead of us, last living city of the north, a mountain of lights wearing a cathedral for a crown — and even here, even now, I feel it before I hear it: the ground under my iron feet carrying a rhythm up through the adamantine, patient, regular, deep beyond deep. Machinery achieving operating temperature.

They bring us through the Pilgrim Gate, because the Cardinal insists on receiving the Emperor's Angels properly, and so the first thing I see in Hive Karsala is the Shrine of Deliverance itself: a basilica built into the hive's foundation-levels, walls sheathed in eight centuries of votive offerings, and above the altar a fresco fifty metres high — Saint Averil, arms outstretched, the ork tide breaking against her light on one side, the Devourer turning to amber stone on the other.

Ten thousand pilgrims are praying beneath it in shifts. The sound is a sea. For one unguarded moment, after months among wolves and heathens, the sound is home.

Then the quake comes.

Gentle — almost polite — a long slow roll under the foundations, and the votive chains ring like ten thousand tiny bells, and the pilgrims raise their voices because they have learned to sing over the miracle's new moods. And in the half-dark behind the altar, where the shrine's oldest stonework meets Ashkarran's living rock, I see the seams of the wall breathe out a light.

Cold. Green. Patient.

That itch again, at the back of the skull. Familiar from somewhere. From nowhere. I don't reach for it.

The fresco of the saint glows faintly from beneath, lit from inside the world, and I stand in the singing and understand with perfect, sinking clarity what I am looking at.

They built the shrine on the doorstep. The miracle has a basement. And the basement's lights are coming on.