Through the fire and the falling masonry and the screaming of overstressed architecture, Nolan caught sight of the white-hooded figure running toward them across the arena floor.
He and the wolf version of himself looked at each other without planning to.
"Why is he here as well?"
Nolan exhaled through his helmet. The white hood, the way the figure moved in powered armor: it was recognizable even at distance, even through smoke.
The wolf's eyes narrowed. He watched the approaching figure with the particular suspicion of someone who had survived by reading strangers correctly for a long time.
"That silhouette is familiar." He kept his voice to Nolan alone. "Were you actually running as Lord Cypher at some point? Because I have no interest in meeting the inner circle's lunatics in this city."
Around them, the situation had stopped being a fight and become a rout. Tyberos was working through the remaining Dark Eldar with the systematic thoroughness of a Chapter Master who had nothing left to prove, and the numbers in the arena were dropping faster than they could be replaced from the exits. The galleries were emptying. The structure was still settling from the first round of detonations, dust and fragments falling from the upper sections in slow curtains.
Nolan opened the command channel.
"Kahurangi. Retrieve the Void Stone. We are withdrawing."
He closed the channel and moved toward the hooded figure, the wolf falling into step beside him without being asked.
"What is the evacuation plan?" Nolan called ahead. "Tell me you prepared one."
Lord Cypher's expression did something at the corners of his mouth that was not quite a smile. He reached up to the front of his ceramite breastplate and drew out a small device from beneath the armor's collar: a webway beacon, compact, already active. The channel tone it emitted was barely audible over the ambient noise of the collapsing arena.
A webway portal opened in front of them. Wide, stable, and immediate.
"Tyberos! Kahurangi! On me, now!"
Nolan's voice carried across the arena without the need for amplification. Within moments Tyberos arrived, the lightning claws still running hot, his armor painted entirely in fluids that had recently belonged to Dark Eldar. The hunting team came in behind him, Kahurangi at the rear, the Void Stone secured.
Tyberos looked at the wolf Nolan for a long moment, taking in the identical face under different wear. Then he looked at Cypher. He said nothing, filing both away.
"Commorragh's defense forces are already responding." Cypher turned his head toward the sky beyond the arena walls, where the silhouettes of Razorwing gunships were visible against the black sun, distant but closing. "Everyone through the portal. Now."
No one argued. The team moved into the portal in sequence, armor scraping past the event horizon of the webway gate, each figure dissolving into the rippling depth beyond.
When the last of them had passed through, Cypher stood alone at the portal's edge for a moment.
He reached to his waist a second time and produced another detonator.
"Coming all this way," he said, conversationally, to the empty arena around him, "and not leaving something to remember us by would be wasteful."
He pressed the switch.
The detonations that followed were not confined to the arena. They spread outward through the sub-levels of the Karmor district in a sequence that had clearly been planned well before the arena doors had opened. Fire climbed the sides of the spiral palace. Structural columns failed in a chain. And then, at a distance that made the ground shake before the sound arrived, something much larger gave way.
Above Commorragh, the Black Sun moved.
The ancient artificial star that had hung over the Dark City for uncountable centuries tilted from its fixed position and began a slow, inexorable descent toward an unknown quarter of the city below. Whatever Cypher's melta bombs had dissolved in the mechanisms holding it in place, the result was visible from every district.
Cypher watched the Razorwing gunships change course in response, their formation breaking as the pilots processed what was happening above them and forgot, for a moment, what they had been pursuing.
He stepped through the portal.
The webway closed behind him.
Low orbit above the garden world. The Gray Shark, Gladius-class frigate.
More than ten hours had passed since the last of them had come through the webway gate. Ten hours in which the adrenaline of Commorragh had metabolized into something quieter, and the wounded had been seen to, and the ship's systems had confirmed what the head count had already suggested: every member of the operation had made it back. Several Carcharodons from the hunting team had taken hits from Dark Eldar splinter weapons, the crystal toxins requiring treatment, but none had died. The Void Stone sat secured in the Gray Shark's armory.
Given what Commorragh was, this outcome was difficult to account for by competence alone.
It helped that Lord Cypher had not simply planted melta bombs at the arena's structural points. He had also, before the operation began, used the Dark Eldar's own communication methods against them: sending signals through their internal networks that drew the bulk of the arena district's defense forces away from the perimeter before anyone had stepped through the first webway gate. The ambush had been designed to catch them in the arena; it had not been designed for what came after. By the time Commorragh's defenders understood what had actually happened, there was nothing left in Karmor to pursue.
In a room on the frigate's upper deck, the wolf version of Nolan was eating steadily and at volume, working through a quantity of food that reflected either a very long period of inadequate nutrition or simply the metabolic requirements of what he was. He did not look up from the table as he spoke.
"I was badly wounded in the end and lost consciousness. When I came back around, I was already in Commorragh." He turned a ration container over in his hand and dealt with its contents efficiently. "I tried to get out several times. None of it worked. So I stopped wasting energy on it and used the arena to stay sharp, thinking that eventually I would accumulate enough to break free on my own terms." A pause. "I did not expect the original to walk through the webway instead."
Nolan sat across from him with his arms folded, watching. Cypher occupied the seat at the end of the table, hood down, the ceramite of his armor marking him as the same person at a different angle.
"I'll be honest," Nolan said. "Meeting you was already a surprise. What is your situation?" He looked from the wolf to Cypher directly. "If the wolf being here is an accident, what is your explanation?"
Cypher tilted his head slightly. "We are all you. But we are not interchangeable. Our histories are different. Our obligations are different."
He reached into the Space-Time Crystal and withdrew two objects, setting them on the table and sliding one toward each of the others. They were black, metal, sized to fit around a wrist. Simple in appearance.
"Relics from the Dark Age of Technology. Reportedly capable of transmitting information across the warp under favorable conditions. If the Emperor watches over the connection, we can stay in contact across whatever distance separates us."
He let that sit for a moment before continuing.
"Guilliman's regency has improved the Imperium's surface condition. That is real, and it matters. But it is surface. On the fronts that don't make it to official records, the Imperium is losing ground consistently. Chaos is not waiting. More worlds have gone dark in the past decade than in the two decades before it." He looked at them both in turn. "The three of us, and any others who may exist, need to coordinate. The loyalists need to be found and gathered, as many as possible. The productive capacity of every world within reach needs to be increased."
His gaze moved to the wolf.
"Your battlefield is not here. After you have recovered, you come with me. Someone is waiting."
Nolan's brow drew together.
"You know a great deal. More than you should, if this is just your experience talking. What are you working toward?"
Cypher spread his hands on the table, a gesture of acknowledged limitation.
"I can act on what I know. I cannot say it aloud. Once the shape of the plan is spoken, whoever set the board for us can adjust their pieces to compensate. Uncertainty is the only protection we have against that."
He paused, then looked at the wolf with something that might have been reluctant honesty.
"One more thing. You should hear this from me rather than discover it another way. You are closer to becoming Khorne's chosen than you appear to realize. If that process reaches its conclusion, the rest of us will send you to death. That is not a threat. It is the agreement we need to have now, while it can be made clearly."
He let it settle.
"The same applies in reverse. If I am corrupted, you kill me. No hesitation."
The wolf swallowed whatever he had been chewing and met Cypher's eyes without expression.
"Understood."
"After the Great Rift opened, the Emperor's power has grown," Cypher continued. "But the human population that power serves is shrinking. The math does not improve over time. I want you to be prepared for the possibility that what we are asked to become is something closer to instruments than individuals."
The wolf looked at him flatly. "Aren't we already instruments?"
Cypher laughed once, short and genuine. "Perhaps I have said too much. The meaning of it may be clearer to you later."
Nolan brought his vibranium palm down on the table. Not hard enough to damage anything, but enough that the impact ended the conversation that had been happening and started the one he intended.
"If you weren't me," he said to Cypher, without particular heat, "I would have considerable difficulty with a man who speaks exclusively in riddles."
He straightened in his seat.
"Now. Let's talk about the Void Stone."