V2 Chapter 62: You're Telling Me You Brought Back What?
Duvette led the 112th's veterans through a final systematic sweep of the main temple and its surrounding structures. Soldiers moved with lasguns chambered and ready, checking every shadow without exception.
Several Word Bearers cultists were still alive in the bloodshed, twitching weakly, using their last breath to murmur Colchisian scripture. Soldiers walked up to each of them without expression, pressed a barrel to the skull, and fired without hesitation.
When the last shot rang through the empty nave and faded into silence, the life-sign detection sweep on the strategic panel went completely quiet.
Duvette confirmed on his retinal map that no hostile contacts remained within a one-kilometre radius of the main temple, and that the Chaos altar which had been tearing at the barrier between realspace and the Warp had been reduced to absolute physical dust by Entropy's Song's temporal discharge. Then he pressed the all-channel vox-bead.
"All units. Combat concluded. Maintain company-level alert formation. Collect the wounded. Bring the identity tags of the dead. We withdraw immediately."
The 112th began executing the withdrawal in order.
When the main body cleared the enormous archway and stepped back out onto the desolate black plaza outside, the suffocating pressure that had been pressing down on the area reduced perceptibly.
The most immediate indicator was the long-range communications array, which had been completely disabled by the high-intensity Warp energy saturation inside the temple. As the unit moved clear, a burst of static came through the equipment and the physical link to low orbit re-established itself.
"Communications handshake confirmed. Encryption protocol reset. Commissar Duvette, report your current status."
Belisarius Cawl's flat synthetic voice cut into Duvette's channel the instant the link was live. There was something fractionally more rapid than usual in the Archmagos's tone. The Ark of Omen had clearly been cycling high-frequency scan attempts over this area for the entire period communications were down.
Duvette walked at the centre of the column and gave his report in a level voice.
"Enemy targets confirmed cleared, Archmagos. The 112th has eliminated the Word Bearers core priesthood and all attached defensive forces in this action. The Word Bearers Dark Apostle is confirmed dead. The Chaos altar at the main temple's centre has been completely destroyed. The barrier is re-closing."
On the other end of the channel, Cawl was receiving and processing.
In honest assessment, if the report had ended there, it would have been remarkable but not entirely without precedent. Operating under severe Warp pollution, surrounded by Tzeentchian daemons, eliminating an entire Word Bearers warband and terminating a Chaos ritual: that was an extreme battlefield performance, but in the classified military files Cawl had reviewed, there were a handful of comparably extreme combat records attached to Duvette's name. The man appeared to possess some innate tactical instinct for reversing impossible situations.
Cawl had not yet shown any particular surprise.
Then Duvette added the next two items in the same casual register he had used for the rest of the report.
"Additionally. In the process of destroying the altar, we confirmed and recovered the object that was serving as the ritual's core. It is a dragon-skull sceptre designated Entropy's Song, confirmed as a lost relic of the Eighteenth Legion's Primarch, the Lord of Fire and Drakes, Vulkan."
A brief pause. Duvette glanced back at the tall figures following at the column's rear.
"We have also brought back thirteen surviving Astartes. Initial identification confirms them as Loyalist Shadow Wolves, Tenth Company combat element."
The communications channel went silent as a sealed room.
A lost relic of the Lord of Fire and Drakes. Living Loyalist Shadow Wolves.
Either piece of information on its own, placed before the Imperium in the Age of Apostasy, would have been sufficient to send political shockwaves across several star sectors. Both of them appearing simultaneously, on an uncharted daemon world, and being brought back intact by a mortal Astra Militarum regiment, was not consistent with any probability model or any historical precedent in the physical universe that Cawl's logic circuits could locate.
Cawl asked Duvette to confirm three times. "Repeat your report, Commissar. You are stating you have recovered members of the Sixteenth Legion. No surviving Loyalist elements of that Legion are consistent with any current probability model."
"I am entirely clear-headed, Archmagos." Duvette's confirmation came back without any hedging. "They are with my column. Alive. White power armour. Wolf's head and inverted crescent on the shoulder guards."
Once Cawl had established that Duvette was not confused or hallucinating, he asked no further questions.
He cut the channel with an immediacy that left no room for anything further, and issued one absolute order before the connection closed.
"Lead your forces to the Carpé family's outer extraction point immediately, at best possible speed. I will be waiting for you directly in the Ark's hangar bay. We meet as soon as you arrive. Maintain the highest level of physical communications silence. Before you see me, allow no one to approach them or the dragon relic."
Cawl's response was exactly what Duvette had anticipated.
What Cawl had not spent one processing thread on, even in passing, even as a footnote, was any inquiry into what had become of the aggressively self-important Thorian Lord Inquisitor who had been so loud before departure, and who had not produced a single sound during the entire debriefing.
The current condition of Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner was this: he was lying on a field stretcher improvised from two steel poles and several pieces of damaged carapace armour by the stronger veterans of the 112th.
His badly dislocated jaw had been reset. The medical operation had been performed by Duvette's adjutant Evan, whose occasional duty as a practice subject for his sister during her nursing rotation at the field hospital had given him a rough, functional, and not particularly gentle understanding of emergency orthopaedic procedures.
Heinz, horizontal on the stretcher, was entirely unlike either of his previous states. The lord-level arrogance was gone. The hysterical fanaticism that had overtaken him in the temple was gone. What remained was something that looked like a body from which every worldly drive had been drained out, leaving only the container. His eyes stared upward at the daemon world's dark-red sky with a blank, fixed intensity. Beneath the bandaging around his jaw, his lips moved with the small, continuous movements of something that had found the only motion still available to it.
The soldiers carrying him caught the sound occasionally. The veteran standing the nearest watch had decided it was a prayer of some kind.
The man who had held power of life and death over populations was now apparently operating on the sustenance of a newly constructed private theology.
Duvette, moving at the column's front, paid no attention whatsoever to the mental state of the man on the stretcher. As long as Heinz did not climb off and interfere with the march, he was two hundred pounds of self-propelled baggage.
On the long walk back, Duvette gave the majority of his attention to the object in his hand.
Entropy's Song had been doing something spectacular when it was Kobath's problem. Radiating temporal chaos, repelling Warp energy with a contemptuous force, then discharging a beam of entropic destruction that had aged a Chaos altar to fine powder. All of that was behind it now. In Duvette's grip, moving across the ash-covered plaza, the sceptre was an inert length of very heavy and very cold metal.
The dragon skull at the head, which had been pulsing with crimson light in the temple, showed nothing now. The draconic metalwork along the shaft had gone dull. The surface was cold to the touch in a way that went past ambient temperature, as though whatever had been living in the material had simply stopped.
Had he overloaded it with that one discharge?
He frowned, shifted his grip, and bounced it in his palm. The physical weight pressed his wrist down considerably — the thing was built to Astartes dimensions and felt it. But from inside, nothing. No response. The Machine-Spirit, if it was still present, was not communicating.
Alternatively: was this the particular pride of a Primarch-forged artefact expressing its opinion of a mortal wielder? Had the sceptre simply used his hand to accomplish what it needed to accomplish, discharged the power it had been accumulating through ten thousand years of resistance, destroyed the desecrating altar, secured its own escape, and then unilaterally declined further interaction?
"Wonderful," Duvette noted internally, with a flatness the situation warranted. "An inanimate relic with the temperament of a master who has decided you are beneath further acknowledgment."
He had no framework for negotiating with ancient Primarch relics in a bad mood, so he shoved Entropy's Song through the belt of his greatcoat at the hip and left it there.
Whether it worked or not, the decision about where it was going was already made. He was not giving it to Belisarius Cawl.
Even if he could never personally activate it again, this object stayed in his possession. Its value as a political instrument was considerable beyond any straightforward calculation. When the Salamanders eventually received word that their Primarch's lost relic had been recovered on a daemon world by a mortal Astra Militarum Colonel-Commissar, they would find him. And when he handed it back to them intact, the debt that would produce from a Chapter that valued honour above almost everything else, and that had consistently been among the most favourable toward ordinary humanity of any Adeptus Astartes Chapter in existence, would be worth more in political terms than anything the materiel exchange with Cawl had generated.
Salamanders friendship was a level of institutional backing that even the Inquisition found inconvenient to press against openly.
He was still running the political arithmetic when something else came forward in his mind. He lowered his head slightly and brought up the System skill panel on his retina, intending to check [Purification]'s status.
The number he found stopped him mid-stride.
He stood in the middle of the moving column for one involuntary second, staring at what was on the panel.
He was looking at the cooldown indicator for [Purification].
He did the arithmetic once. Then he did it again. One digit, two digits, three digits, four digits.
Four thousand, three hundred and eighty hours.
He ran the conversion without wanting to. Four thousand three hundred and eighty hours was exactly six months.
A six-month cooldown.
The corner of his mouth pulled once.
He had used [Purification] on thirteen Astartes. Stripped ten thousand years of Warp corruption and physical mutation from thirteen soldiers. One application, thirteen targets. And the result was a six-month lockout on what was, at this point, one of the most strategically significant capabilities the System had produced.
He called back the skill description in his memory: cooldown period following use will vary according to the number of targets and the nature and depth of the corruption.
Nature and depth. Right.
He looked back at the thirteen Shadow Wolves keeping their formation at the column's rear.
When he had first received [Purification], somewhere in the back of his mind, a considerably more ambitious calculation had been running. He had been turning over the possibility of travelling to Macragge, standing in front of Marneus Calgar, and using [Purification] directly on Roboute Guilliman in the stasis field. No Yvraine. No Cawl. Just the skill, applied to the wound, and the Primarch walks out.
He had not let himself think too far into what his standing within the largest Space Marine Chapter in the galaxy would be after that.
The cooldown counter he was currently staring at delivered that particular ambition a blunt and efficient end.
If purifying thirteen ordinary Astartes veterans cost six months, what would purifying a Primarch cost?
A demigod whose throat had been cut with a divine-grade toxin formulated specifically by Fulgrim, a daemon Primarch, to destroy what it struck. A being who had been sitting in a stasis field for ten thousand years with that toxin continuing to work on him for every moment of it.
Ten years? A hundred years?
And beyond Guilliman, there was the Men of Iron STC he had flagged for later, which was contaminated in ways that were entirely different and potentially worse.
This was a serious problem.
He thought, without intending to, about the vision on Formal Prime. The Emperor, in that strange place between dimensions, had told him with complete clarity that he had personally intervened to limit a power that was operating without restraint.
Was that what these cooldown periods were? The Emperor's hand on a dial, keeping the output from becoming something that overwrote rather than served?
Why would he do that?
Duvette walked through the ash of the plaza with the question moving through him. [Purification] was, by any reasonable analysis, the most useful tool a human being could carry into the Imperium's current situation. The Warp was eating the galaxy from within. A capability that could forcibly strip that corruption from whatever it touched, applied consistently and at scale, could do things that ten thousand years of conventional warfare had failed to accomplish.
If the limit were removed, he could work through the daemon worlds in the Eye of Terror individually. He could start with a list.
Why put a lock on that?
His eyes drifted to the System warning text beneath [Purification]'s description, the line he had registered and not fully processed when the skill first activated.
When the ultimate order of the soul covers the ultimate Chaos of the immaterium, is what follows truly worth the cost?
He remembered something else. The Emperor's last words in that vision, before it dissolved: hold to yourself. Do not forget who you were. Do not let the power consume what you are.
His stride slowed fractionally.
If [Purification] was, at its core, the imposition of absolute order on the fabric of reality, a force that rewrote the physics of whatever it touched back to an uncorrupted baseline, then what happened to the person who used it without restraint?
If he used that capability constantly, at high frequency, to methodically erase every trace of Chaos from everything he encountered, would the nature of the capability begin to change the nature of the person wielding it? Would empathy erode? Fear? Hesitation? The private desires that made a person someone rather than something?
If what remained was a being that processed corrupted targets and applied the purification function and moved to the next target, with no grief, no doubt, no selfishness, no humanity left to speak of, was that still Duvette Erdmann?
Or was that something that wore his body the way a machine wears its housing?
What an extraordinarily difficult universe this was.
Duvette exhaled at length, shook his head firmly, and drove the entire chain of thought out of his mind by force of will.
He was overthinking. When he could not resolve something, he stopped carrying it and moved on. He was alive. He had leverage. He had Entropy's Song at his hip and thirteen ancient warriors at his back and a six-month cooldown that he would deal with when it expired.
That was sufficient for now.