eventually. ‘I propose that we regroup, head back the way we came, destroy the ship in case it is, or
contains, what the eldar were seeking, and get back to the landing site. We’ll have time to kill, but I’m
sure I can think of something to keep us occupied.’
‘Not another one of your impromptu training sessions, Gileas,’ objected Reuben with good-natured
humour. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of coming up with new and interesting ways to get us to fight each
other?’
‘No,’ came the deadpan reply. ‘Never.’
Bhehan allowed the Reckoners to discuss their next course of action amongst themselves, waiting for
the inevitable request to see what the runes said. He kept his attention half on their conversation, but the
other half was caught by something in the dirt beside the dead alien’s head. From his kneeling position, he
reached over and scooped it up in one blue-gauntleted hand.
Barely two inches across, the deep wine-red stone was attached to a sturdy length of vine: a crudely
made necklace. Bhehan’s brow furrowed slightly as he glanced again at the corpse. It had felt feral and
not even remotely intelligent, but then most of its synapses had been shredded by Reuben’s bolter.
Putting a hand back against its head yielded nothing. He was feeling more psychic emanations from the
trees themselves than from this once-living being. Of course, the charm may not have belonged to the
animal; perhaps it had stolen it. It was impossible to know for sure without employing full regression
techniques. For that option, however, the thing needed to be alive.
The young Prognosticator brought the stone closer to his face to study it more intently, and another
flash of memory seared through his mind. This one, though, was not the primal force of nature that he had
felt from the dead xenos. This was something else entirely. Sudden flashes emblazoned themselves across
his mind. Shadowy images wavered in his mind’s eye, images that were intangible and hard to make out.
A shape. Male? Maybe. Human? Definitely not. Eldar. It was eldar. Wearing the garments of those
known as warlocks. It was screaming, cowering.
It was dying. It was being attacked. A huge shape loomed over it, blocking out the sunlight…
‘Prognosticator!’
Gileas’s sudden bark brought the psyker out of the trance that he had not even realised he’d fallen
into. He stared at the sergeant, the brief look of displacement on his face swiftly replaced by customary
attentiveness.
‘My apologies, brother-sergeant,’ he said, shaking his mind clear of the visions. He got to his feet
and stood straight-backed and alert, the images in his mind already faded. ‘Here, I found this. It might
give us some clue to what happened here.’ He proffered the stone and Gileas stared at it with obvious
distrust before taking it. He held it up at arm’s length and studied it as it spun, winking in the sunlight.
‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The eldar wear them. Something to do
with their religion, isn’t it?’
‘In honesty, I’m not completely sure,’ replied Bhehan. ‘I haven’t had an opportunity to study one this
closely. We, I mean the company Prognosticators, have many theories…’ Seeing that the sergeant wasn’
t even remotely interested in theories, the psyker tailed off and accepted the object back from Gileas,
who seemed more than pleased to be rid of it.
‘If this is an eldar item,’ said Gileas, grimly, ‘then it’s not too much of a leap of faith to believe that
they’ve been present, or are present, on this planet. Increases the odds of that wreck being eldar and
also that this planet may well have been their ultimate destination.’
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The others concurred. The sergeant nodded abruptly. ‘Then we definitely return to the ship and we
destroy the whole thing. We make damn sure that they find nothing when they get here. Are we in
accord?’
He glanced around and all nodded agreement. They clasped their hands together, one atop the other.
Gileas looked sideways at Bhehan who, surprised by this unspoken invitation into the brotherhood of the
squad, laid his hand on the others.
‘Brothers all,’ said Gileas, and the squad responded in kind.
‘Fetch Wulfric back,’ commanded Gileas. Tikaye nodded and voxed through to his battle-brother.
There was no reply.
‘Wulfric, report,’ Tikaye said into the vox, even as they began heading in the direction he had taken,
weapons at the ready.
THEY MOVED DEEPER still into the jungle.
It was rapidly becoming far more densely packed, the vibrant green of the trees and plants creating
an arboreal tunnel through which the five giants marched. Despite the overriding concern at their
companion’s whereabouts, the Astartes welcomed the moment’s relief from the constant squinting
brought about by standing in the direct sunlight. As they made their way with expediency through the
trees, light filtered through to mottle the dirt and scrub of the forest floor. Parched dust marked their
passage, rising up in clouds around their feet.
‘Brother Wulfric, report.’ Tikaye continually tried the vox, but there was still nothing. Bhehan
extended the range of his psychic powers, reaching for Wulfric’s awareness, and instead received
something far worse. His nostrils flared as a familiar coppery scent assailed him, and he turned slightly to
the west.
‘It’s this way,’ he said, with confidence.
‘You are sure, brother?’
‘Aye, brother-sergeant.’
‘Jalonis, lead the way. I will bring up the rear.’ Gileas, with the practical and seemingly effortless ease
that he did everything, organised the squad. They had travelled a little further into the trees when a crack
as loud as a whip caused them all to whirl on the spot, weapons readied and primed. The first fall of
raindrops announced that it was nothing more than the arrival of the tropical storm. The thunder that had
barely been audible in the distance was now directly above them.
The vox in Gileas’s ear crackled with static and he tapped at it irritably. These atmospherics caused
such frustrating communication problems. It had never failed to amaze Gileas, a man raised as a savage in
a tribe for whom the pinnacle of technological advancement was the longbow, that a race who could
genetically engineer super-warriors still couldn’t successfully produce robust communications.
More static flared, then Jalonis’s voice broke through. It was a scattered message, breaking up as
the Space Marine spoke, but Gileas had no trouble extrapolating its meaning.
‘… Jal… found Wulfric… t’s left… him anyway. Dead ah… maybe… dred yards or so.’
Gileas acknowledged tersely and accelerated his pace.
Another crack of thunder reverberated so loudly that Gileas swore he could feel his teeth rattle in his
jaw. The light drizzle gave way rapidly to huge, fat drops of rain. The canopy of the trees did its best to
repel them, but ultimately the persisting rain triumphed. The bare heads of the Silver Skulls were soaked
swiftly. Gileas’s hair, wild and untamed at the best of times, soon turned to unruly curls that clung tightly
around his face and eyes. He put his helmet back on, not so much to keep his head dry, but more to
reduce the risk of his vision being impaired by his own damp hair getting in the way.
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The moment he put his helmet back on, he knew what he would find when he reached Jalonis. The
information feed scrolling in front of his eyes told him everything that he needed to know. A sense of
foreboding stole over him, and he murmured a prayer to the Emperor under his breath.
The precipitation did nothing to dispel the steaming heat of the forest, but merely landed on the dusty
floor where it was immediately swallowed into the ground as though it had never been.
‘Sergeant Ur’ten.’
Jalonis stood several yards ahead, a look of grim resignation on his face. ‘You should come and see
this. I’m afraid it’s not pretty.’
Jalonis, a practical man by nature, had ever been the master of understatement. What Gileas
witnessed as he looked down caused his choler to rise immediately. With the practice of decades, he
carefully balanced his humours.
Wulfric’s armour had been torn away and discarded, scattered around the warrior’s corpse. The
Space Marine’s throat had been ripped apart with speed and ferocity, which had prevented him from
alerting his battle-brothers or calling for aid.
The thorax had been slit from neck to groin, exposing his innards. In this heat, even with the steady
downpour of rain, the stink of death was strong. The fused ribcage had been shattered, leaving Wulfric’s
vital organs clearly visible, slick with blood and mucus. Or at least, what remained of them.
Where Wulfric’s primary and secondary hearts should have been was instead a huge cavity. Gileas
stared for long moments, his conditioning and training assisting his deductive capability. Whatever had
attacked Wulfric had gone for the throat first, rendering his dead brother mute. It had torn through his
armour like it was shoddy fabric rather than ceramite and plasteel. The assailant, or more likely the
assailants, had then proceeded to shred the skin like parchment and defile Wulfric’s body.
The details were incidental. One of Gileas’s brothers was dead. More than that, one of his closest
brothers was dead. For that, there would be hell to pay.
‘Take stock,’ he said to Tikaye, who whilst not an Apothecary was the squad’s primary field medic.
‘I want to know what has been taken.’ His voice was steady and controlled, but the rumble and pitch of
the words hinted strongly at the anger bubbling just under the surface.
The stoic Tikaye moved to Wulfric and began to examine the body. He murmured litanies of death
fervently under his breath as he did so.
‘You understand, of course,’ said Gileas, his voice low and menacing, ‘this means someone… or
something is going to regret crossing my path this day.’
The falling rain, evaporating in the intense heat, caused steam to rise in ethereal tendrils from the
ground. It loaned even more of a macabre aspect to the scene, and the coils partially swathed Wulfric’s
body as they rose. It was a cheap mockery of the tradition of lighting memorial pyres on the Silver Skulls
’ burial world and it did little to ease their collective grief and rage.
Staring down at their fallen brother, each murmuring his own personal litany, the remaining Silver
Skulls were fierce of countenance, ready for a fight in response to this atrocity.
‘Several of his implants are gone,’ came Tikaye’s voice from the ground. There was barely masked
outrage in his tone.
‘Gone? What does gone mean?’
‘Taken, brother-sergeant. The biscopea, Larraman’s organ, the secondary and primary hearts, and
from what I can make out, his progenoid is gone, too. I’d suggest that whoever or whatever did this
knew what they wanted and took it. It’s too clean to be an arbitrary or random coincidence.’
‘You said they were animals, Prognosticator.’ Gileas couldn’t keep the accusation out of his tone. ‘
That conflicts directly with what Brother Tikaye suggests. One of you is wrong.’ Bhehan shook his head.
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‘The creature we found was an animal,’ he countered. ‘That was before I found the stone, however.
It’s possible that it had been wearing it as some sort of decoration. I acknowledge that may potentially
suggest intelligence. I–’
‘I did not ask for excuses, neither did I ask for a lecture. The runes, Prognosticator.’ Gileas’s voice
was barbed. The sergeant had a reputation amongst the Silver Skulls as a great warrior, a man who
would charge headlong into the fray without hesitation and also as a man who did not suffer fools gladly,
particularly when his wrath was tested. Da’chamoren, the name he had brought with him from his tribe,
translated literally as ‘Son of the Waxing Moon’. Gileas’s power and resilience had always seemed to
grow proportionately to his rising fury.
It was a fitting name.
‘Yes, sir,’ Bhehan replied, suitably chastened by the change in the sergeant’s attitude. Without further
comment, he commenced another Sighting. He felt a moment’s uncertainty, but didn’t dwell on it. At first,
nothing came to him and he could not help but wonder if he was going to experience what his psychic
brethren termed the ‘Deep Dark’, a moment of complete psychic blindness. Prognosticators considered
this to be a sign that they had somehow fallen from the Emperor’s grace. Bhehan had tasted the sensation
once before and it had left a bitter flavour of ash in his mouth. He firmly set aside all thoughts of failure
and closed his eyes. The Emperor was with them, he asserted firmly. Had He not already communicated
His will through His loyal servant?
Reassured, his mental equilibrium ceased its churning and settled again. Bhehan allowed the reading
of the runes to draw him. The stones served well as a focus for his powers, helping him to draw in all the
psychic echoes that flitted around this charnel house like ghosts. Each Prognosticator found their own
focus; some, like Bhehan, chose runes whilst others divined the Emperor’s will through a tarot.
‘The perpetrators of this butchery… I sense that they want something from us. To learn, perhaps? To
understand how we are put together.’ The Prognosticator’s eyes were still closed, his voice barely more
than a whisper. ‘Why? If they were animals, they would have just torn the flesh from his bones. They
have not. They have intelligence, yes, great intelligence… or at least… no. Not all of them. Just one,
perhaps? A leader of sorts?’ The questioning was entirely rhetorical and nobody answered or interrupted
him during the stream of consciousness. The rain drummed on their armour, creating a background
rhythm of its own.
Bhehan’s hand closed around the eldar stone still in his hand. To his relief, a flood of warmth suffused
him, a sensation he had long equated as the prelude to a vision. No Deep Dark for him, then. His powers
were intact. The feeling of relief was quickly replaced by one of intense dislike as he sensed a new
presence in his mind.
They know what you are because of us. Because of what we know. The gift unintentionally
given.
The words were perfectly sharp and audible, but the image of the being who spoke them was not.
Tall and willowy, the apparition shimmered before his closed eyelids like an imprint of the sun burned
onto his retina.
They absorbed what we were, what we are. They seek to do the same to you through nothing
