The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Other cries join hers. Some, like Skoia’s, beseech ancestor-spirits or the memories of the lost, others are offered up as desperate prayers to the Emperor or the false and half-forgotten gods of distant worlds. It is the unified cry of people drawn from hundreds of cultures voicing their psychic gifts in terminal harmony.

Not all are pained. Some are obliviously joyful, others are sixth sense distillations of helpless rage or simple, crude fear. The chorus of outreaching emotion rises, and the battalion of interconnected machines all run louder, harder, in sympathetic response.

She is fading now. Her breaths no longer come, and that only amplifies her silent cry.

She slumps forwards, cheek pressed to the unbreakable glass, her lips trembling, her eyes wide and shivering. The stiller she becomes, the darker her sight falls, the louder she screams inside her skull.

And now, only now, does she hear the melody of the other souls of the one thousand sharing the same fate, suffering what she suffers. Their screams and prayers and panic and fears entwine, unseen by all, and form one sound, one impossibly perfect note. Those outside the coffins may yet hear it, but its true purity is unheard by any but the dying souls themselves.

It is the very first note in a song that will last ten thousand years, and perhaps beyond.

She, Skoia, is its first singer.

Twenty-Two The Anathema’s Daughters / Only in death does duty end / Sunrise

1

Arkhan Land watched as Zephon fired his last shot and ducked back into the darkness of the tank’s interior to reload. The spent magazine clattered to the deck as he slapped a new one home. Hauling himself back up into the cupola, the Blood Angel braced again and opened fire once more.

The technoarchaeologist, his face bleached with scrolling viewscreen data, veered the tank in a slow arc. Volkite cannons squealed in arrhythmic discord. Small-arms fire rained against the blessedly reinforced ceramite hull, reduced by the dense plating to dull bangs.

The grav-Raider’s interior reeked with the porcine scent of burned gore. Wounded Sisters and Custodians lay across the deck of the hold, too injured to keep fighting. Land suspected several of them were already dead.

Zephon ducked back into the tank and slammed the cupola closed. ‘I am out of ammunition,’ he stated. His eyes glimmered with what Land suspected, quite correctly, was battle-lust – a rather primitive emotion that the Martian thankfully had no experience with whatsoever.

The Blood Angel locked his bolter to hip with a thumbed activation of magnetic seals. He crouched by one of the injured Sisters, who clutched the stump of her arm against her chest. The severance of her left arm was the least of her wounds if the running of blood beneath her was anything to go by. Something had gone badly wrong inside her during the battle. A sword through the guts, most likely, thought Land. A pathetic way to die. A death worthy of a primate in Terra’s Stone Era.

He loathed the female warriors, and couldn’t for the life of him fathom why. They were private, yes, but seemed agreeable enough. Yet merely looking at them made his skin crawl. Being near enough to smell one of them, or Omnissiah forbid accidentally come into contact with one of them, was enough to make his bile rise.