V3 Chapter 66: Invasions, Eight Weeks, Eight Days, Eight Hours Apart
In a chamber aboard the Macragge's Honour, Duvette and Guilliman sat facing each other as they usually did.
Recent battle reports from the Lamenters, the Mantis Warriors, and the Astral Claws lay spread across the table. The data-slates had been sorted and stacked to one side, while at the centre, a holographic star chart marked every recent anomalous incursion along the edge of the Maelstrom.
The silence stretched on for a moment.
Guilliman spoke abruptly.
"You know of my fallen brother, Magnus?"
Duvette did not answer right away.
He looked up at Guilliman, his expression still calm. The question did not surprise him; after all, the voice that had come from the red crystal necklace moments before had already told Guilliman more than enough.
Guilliman studied his face, and quickly realised he perhaps should not have asked at this moment.
By Duvette's own account, he had even met the Emperor before. Given that, knowing of Magnus's existence hardly seemed difficult to explain.
Still, a thought flickered through Guilliman's mind.
This mortal knew far too much, things he had no business knowing, and possessed abilities that defied any ordinary explanation. Could all of this truly be the Emperor's doing?
He quickly pushed the thought down.
That was not what mattered right now.
Guilliman looked back down at the reports on the table and asked a different question instead.
"What do you think he's after?"
This time Duvette did not hesitate.
"Using the Astral Claws' hands to spark a civil war."
Guilliman nodded.
That matched his own judgement.
Had the nine assassins succeeded in getting the Astral Claws branded as traitors on the spot, Badab Prime would have become a battlefield in an instant. Huron would have been forced to resist, and the Astral Claws dragged straight into the wrath of the Primarch, and of the crusade fleet along with it.
But Duvette quickly added, "Still, I don't think that's his only goal."
Guilliman raised his head.
Duvette met the Primarch's gaze and continued. "Even if he'd succeeded, the worst that could have come of it was Badab Prime and the Astral Claws Chapter being wiped out entirely. That would have thrown the Maelstrom into deeper chaos, and delayed our return to Terra."
He tapped a finger lightly against the table as he spoke.
"But our fleet is right here. Scattered Chaos warbands, xenos raiders, and Ork remnants could never actually stand in the way of this crusade fleet's cleansing."
Guilliman listened in silence.
Duvette said, "So he can't simply be after a civil war. He must mean to use the chaos that would follow it to accomplish something else."
Guilliman needed only a moment to consider it before agreeing with the reasoning.
"And," Duvette said again, "he told us before that even if we uncovered it ahead of time, that too was part of the plan."
Guilliman's gaze darkened.
Duvette went on. "And there's that line as well. Facing your brother's wrath."
The words settled the room back into quiet.
Guilliman turned the message over in his mind.
Not a single word from Magnus could be taken at face value, yet none of it could be dismissed as empty noise either. Tzeentch's servants delighted in wrapping truth in lies, and just as often used the truth itself to mislead an enemy.
Duvette, too, was turning over every thread of the matter.
The assassination attempt.
The nine puppets.
The red crystal necklace.
Magnus's message.
The sudden surge of incursions across the Maelstrom.
He suddenly looked down at the holographic star chart on the table.
Almost at the same moment, Guilliman's eyes fell on it too.
The star chart marked recent incursion activity across the edge of the Maelstrom.
The Lamenters had supplied their engagement records from the western fringe. The Mantis Warriors had provided their concealed transit routes along with their own battle records. And the Astral Claws had only just handed over their reports, covering nearly a year of fighting across the outer Badab sector.
There had been a great many incursions.
Pirates, Orks, traitor fleets, small Chaos cults, and xenos plunderers, all of it was there. The Maelstrom had always been this chaotic; taken individually, none of these reports looked especially out of the ordinary.
But Duvette found himself, almost without thinking, picking out the largest engagements among them.
His finger slid across the star chart, highlighting each one in turn.
Every one of these engagements had been led by Khornate warbands as the primary invading force.
Their purpose was unclear, but the casualties had been enormous. Several worlds had lost their major cities entirely, and countless civilians and defenders had died in the slaughter.
None of these Khornate warbands had been small in scale.
Several engagements had been broken by the Astral Claws' main strike group, the Badab fleet, and local defence forces acting together. A few others had seen Huron personally lead the Astral Claws into the fight.
Looking over those reports, Duvette couldn't help thinking to himself that Huron's ambition might run deep, but the man genuinely had the strength to back it.
The Astral Claws' reports were remarkably consistent.
Every engagement ended in victory, the Chaos warbands broken or wiped out entirely. But in the appendices, Duvette kept coming across the same description, over and over.
These Khornate warbands fought to the death and refused to retreat.
They had not withdrawn upon defeat the way ordinary raiders would, nor had they made any attempt to preserve their ships or their strongest warriors. Many of the warbands, once surrounded, kept pressing forward against cities, star ports, and refugee zones until their very last warrior fell.
Guilliman noticed the same thing.
"They weren't fighting to win," the Primarch said.
Duvette nodded.
"Doesn't look like they were after plunder, either."
He kept dragging the star chart, arranging the largest Khornate incursions in chronological order.
Deep within the Maelstrom.
The edge of the Badab sector.
The outer reaches of the Cheiman Drift.
Near the primary Badab transit route.
The incursions did not line up in any tidy order, yet as Duvette looked over the markers, an uneasy feeling suddenly rose in him.
They looked like a fuse.
He said nothing right away, only counting silently in his head. Two, three... six, seven. Duvette's finger stopped.
He looked toward the nearest Badab sector fortress world to the seventh incursion site.
In the next instant, he snapped his head up to look at Guilliman.
Guilliman had already seen it too.
They spoke the name almost in the same breath.
"Castellan-Badab."
The air in the room turned heavy in an instant.
Castellan-Badab was the key fortress world along the outer stretch of the main Badab transit route, and it was also the very rendezvous point the crusade fleet had already settled on once its scattered clearance operations were complete.
If something went wrong there, the entire route to Badab Prime would be thrown into jeopardy.
Duvette immediately pulled up the timing records.
He converted the start times, peak intensities, and end times of all seven Khornate incursions into standard Terran time.
Before long, an unsettling pattern emerged before them.
"Eight weeks."
Duvette said.
"Eight days."
His voice dropped lower.
"Eight hours."
Guilliman's eyes went cold as he studied the interval.
Duvette went on. "The margin of error falls within what you'd expect from astropathic delay and Warp-transit record discrepancies. Every eight weeks, eight days, and eight hours, a large Khornate warband invades a world and inflicts mass casualties."
He looked back at the reports.
"These warbands fight to the death, clearly not ordinary plunder. They're likely drawn by something, or their purpose was blood from the very start."
Guilliman finished the thought he had left unspoken.
"A blood ritual."
Duvette did not argue the point.
He looked at the seven markers on the star chart, then back at Castellan-Badab.
If the first seven engagements had all been blood-sacrifice nodes, then Castellan-Badab was very likely the eighth.
Eight.
Khorne's holy number.
Guilliman said, his voice low. "Magnus used the assassination attempt to draw our attention. Had it succeeded, Badab Prime would already be consumed entirely by chaos and civil war by now."
But how could Magnus be working with the World Eaters? Had two Chaos powers truly joined forces, each for their own ends? Guilliman turned the question over, brow furrowed.
But at the same moment, Duvette, his expression grim, fixed his eyes on Guilliman and spoke slowly. "If we calculate it by this interval, the eighth blood sacrifice didn't begin today."
"It's already finished."
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