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When the battle is over there are arrangements, invocations, supplications that need to be made before they can meet. It's what comes of being given over to different gods, the scraping bone-on-bone discomfort of clashing impulses and needs channelled through the frail, breakable minds and flesh of human bodies.
For the sniper Huiyan, sworn to the God of Blood along with the rest of her regiment - a relic term from when such things had meaning - it is easier. An extra kill taken at the battle's end, taking a greater chance than she prefers but being rewarded by the whipcrack of her long-las and the sight of another crumpled body through her scope. A propitiation, a spiritual prophylactic, well worth the effort to appease the Blood God for her contact with another deity's follower.
In the eight subjective years since her unit was abandoned by the corpse on Terra, the effort of hunting and killing has become a well-practiced rite, a familiar muscle-memory trained up shot by shot and kill by kill. Stalking her target, silent and predatory, but always with the throbbing adrenaline-song of the kill pulling her onwards, to go further, to slaughter more.
Huiyan's chosen weapon is a centuries-old scoped lasrifle, almost as long as she is tall, its barrel wrapped in uneven, red-tinted strips of cloth taken as trophies from dozens of enemy uniforms. The long-las has changed hands dozens of times, drifting in and out of the Immaterium with its wielders, and in recent years it has begun to bleed from some indefinable place beneath its worn black casing if it goes too long without killing.
Distantly, she can remember the words of the Uplifting Primer and the speeches of commissars and priests. The machine-spirit of the lasgun is a steadfast companion, they said, loyal and simple as a dog. Huiyan's homeworld did not have dogs, but she has learned something of them, and she thinks the spirit of this long-las is a mad thing, a rabid dog, and yet one which she is enmeshed with like two cuts of meat passing through the same grinder.
The lasrifle is her instrument and she is the lasrifle's instrument and together they hunt. Sometimes she wonders if when she dies the long-las will die too, quietly extinguishing its dim row of diagnostic lights to rot alongside her. She doubts it, though. The weapon's spirit is too strong for that. She thinks it will find a new wielder instead, just as it found her.
She leaves the encampment of her warband and heads out into the ruined capital city of the world they've conquered. No one pays any attention to her, far too engrossed with whatever celebrations they happen to be indulging in, feeling the intermixed euphorias of victory and survival filtered through the prejudices of whatever gods they serve.
Theirs is a broad church, after all. The campaign for this world has drawn in not just the followers of the Blood God but those of the other great deities as well, and so the simple, honest bloodletting of her own comrades is taking place cheek-by-jowl with the more decadent fleshly-pharmaceutical indulgences of a Slaaneshi contingent and, further away, the intensely biological sounds of whatever the Nurglites are up to. At least they're having fun.
There is, however, also a great cult of the Changer of Ways present in the city. Huiyan has seen them in passing during the battle, glimpses of feathers and flashes of arcane blue, and has felt the teeth-itching metaphysical fallout of their magics hitting her skin like raindrops. She knows Certeiras is with them - the planet's local vox-network is still down but the Chaos forces' own cobbled-together communications have been sufficient for her... friend, companion, casual lover, all at once and none of the above, to get a message through.
Coded, of course, and incomprehensible to any reader beyond the intended one. Words are Certeiras' weapon just as the long-las is Huiyan's, and she can make them do many unsettling things. Huiyan has learned something of her - she is not a convert, did not abandon the False Emperor after awakening to the truth of the real world and the one beyond. Instead, like all the other inhabitants of her homeworld, she was born into the worship of the Changer of Ways. And, like the other inhabitants of her world, her heart will stop beating unless her every ninth utterance is a lie.
It stretched Huiyan's credulity almost to breaking point when Certeiras first described it to her. How is it possible to live with that constant mental presence, some part of oneself permanently servitorised to the task of counting nine-and-nine-and-nine, forever, needing to utter a falsehood at every requisite moment with one's life depending on the accuracy of the count? Maddening. Give her the simple clarity of blood for the Blood God and skulls for the Skull Throne, she thinks. That's a blunt kind of fairness, a transactional honesty which the other gods, from what she's witnessed, seem to lack.
The message gave her the location of a plaza about midway between their camps, formerly an elegant pleasure-park for the world's nobility reached by foot or groundcar along wide, paved boulevards. The streets are now choked with rubble and craters and worse, to the point that a vehicle will never be able to use them again, but walking there is still achievable enough for a soldier of Huiyan's experience. She has moved and lived and fought in the wreckage of countless cities, after all, and picking through the corpse of this one brings nothing she has not already experienced.
She makes her way over a jagged fall of rubble, onwards into a clearer area where her boots clink and shuffle through a thin carpet of gleaming shell-casings which obscures the rockcrete surface of the road. A heavy stubber emplacement, judging by the gathering of burnt and misshapen wreckage behind a low wall of sandbags at the centre.
On the warped shaft of a gun barrel, Huiyan can see a single stray Nurgling swinging back and forth, holding on with its stubby arms as it gives her a mocking look. She gets the instant urge to either shoot it or simply run over and kick it like a scrumball, but she resists. In a place like this, where there's one of the creatures there are bound to be many others and she has no desire to perish under a tide of giggling green filth.
So, she just makes her way past at a distance, cautiously, giving the little daemon a brief nod as she walks by which it returns with a pantomime scowl before letting go of the gun barrel and dropping out of sight to land with a sticky thud. They are hunting for survivors, she thinks, whatever locals who may be injured or hiding among the devastation, and so for now the uneasy truce between the Powers still holds.
It will collapse eventually, though. It always does, when the cause that made them set aside their differences no longer exists. Some minor offence or other will flare up, maybe even a millennia-old grievance between the Astartes who lead their various warbands, and then the orders will filter down to the hordes of mortal cultists and traitors and lost and damned. To the devout followers of the Blood God it really does not matter, theologically.
Conflict is the great engine of the material and immaterial universes, and spilled blood is what keeps the gears turning. And yet, Huiyan wouldn't be human, changeable, vulnerable, if it didn't pain her to know that her time with Certeiras will once again likely be cut short by unstoppably greater forces.
She continues on, beyond the Nurgling and its playground of wreckage, moving cautiously across the drifts of rubble. She wears a mottled-grey hooded camouflage cloak over the dull red of her uniform, and trusts that it will hide her at least slightly from any observers. At first Huiyan doesn't even realise that she has entered the once-beautiful plaza, since its edges are subsumed by the outflowing debris of the destroyed city. It only takes a short time for the damage to lessen, though, and for the remnants of manicured grass and meandering paths to become apparent.
There is, impossibly, an ornate wrought-metal gazebo with gilded finials still standing at the plaza's heart. Certeiras is waiting for her there, idly paging through a thick, leather-bound tome emblazoned with the symbol of her deity. She looks up when Huiyan's boot makes a quiet scuffing sound on the uneven ground, smiling, and like always the first thing Huiyan notices is her eyes. She has more of them than she did the last time they met.
"I'm glad you made it," Certeiras says as Huiyan approaches, and it feels like she could intend a multitude of things with that statement - gladness that Huiyan succeeded in crossing the city, gladness that she was willing to meet, gladness that she survived the battle. All of them at once, perhaps, or even more besides.
Huiyan has always been a woman of actions rather than words, and so she just walks over and kisses Certeiras as gently as she is able to. Her hands settle easily on the cultist's waist despite their difference in height, and Certeiras smiles again and reaches up to push back Huiyan's hood.
"Let me see you," she murmurs.
Height is not their only point of contrast - Huiyan's well-worn red uniform, much repaired but still keeping to familiar, practical Guard lines despite everything, looks even more drab next to the layered, flowing robes in a kaleidoscope of Tzeentchian blues, lilacs and greens which Certeiras favours. Her hair, too, is engagingly long and flowing and multicoloured in the same iridescent palette.
Most notable of all, though, is the difference in their mutation. Blessings of the Dark Gods, some call the changes, signs of the attention and goodwill of one's deity, and although Huiyan has seen too much not to believe it, there is still some deeply-ingrained impulse within her which jolts with the old unreasoning fury of the Imperial Cult, the drumbeat of heretic-mutant-unclean burn-kill-purge which leaves her feeling quietly ashamed. If they are blessings then Certeiras has been richly blessed, not just with eyes but her limbs as well which are slender and birdlike, terminating in nimble, curved claws and bright, soft feathers. There is no way she could ever walk openly in Imperial society.
One of those avian hands reaches out once more to part Huiyan's unevenly-shorn black hair, stroking smoothly through it to settle on the small, rounded nub of a horn just beginning to form on her scalp.
"It suits you," Certeiras says warmly, intimately, and something in her tone and her touch the look in all of her eyes makes Huiyan's cheeks flush.
"Thanks," she replies gruffly. "I'm still getting used to it."
"Of course," Certeiras says. "These things take time, and even a joyous and blessed change is still a change. I'll always remember the meaning of my first one."
She holds out the claws on one hand, black and raptorlike with a vicious curve.
"I had fingernails once," she explains. "Beautiful ones. I was quite vain about them, to the exclusion of other more deserving subjects."
As she listens, a thought itches quietly at the back of Huiyan's mind. Is this the ninth utterance, is this the lie? Was it earlier, or is it still to come? The uncertainty stings like a splinter under the skin. Although she has to admit that it does feel believable, based on her scant knowledge, that the Changer of Ways would impart such a capricious lesson to a wayward follower.
It occurs to Huiyan, not for the first time, that she has no real knowledge of how old Certeiras is. Outwardly she looks about half a decade older than Huiyan's own subjective twenty-four years, but even that estimate is clouded by the influence of the Immaterium. It matters very little, really.
Come to think of it, in objective terms, following the timeline of the strictly material universe and the narrow-minded corpse-worshippers who cling to it like vermin to the debris of a shipwreck, Huiyan knows that she herself is about ninety years old. Her regiment's pledge of fealty to the Blood God has almost faded from living memory, but for Huiyan and her comrades it happened less than a decade ago, fresh blood and raw wounds still swathed in bandages. How much more intense must the dysjunction be for someone like Certeiras, born and brought up in the nebulous reality-blending outer reaches of the Eye of Terror? Huiyan has heard of Astartes, millennia-old veterans of the Long War, whose time in the Warp makes them perceive only a few centuries to have passed since the era of the Great Heresy, the Siege and the Scouring.
Perhaps, she thinks, Certeiras is like that too on a smaller, mortal, human scale, equally adrift on the tides of the Immaterium in her own way. It really is miraculous that they found one another, she thinks, and something about the profundity of that idea jolts Huiyan out of her reverie. If her silence bothered Certeiras, the cultist is giving no sign - a certain pensive stillness is expected of snipers, after all, and Huiyan has never been a forthcoming conversationalist even at the best of times.
With her it is actions over words, just as it always has been, just as it always will be, and so she sweeps her camo-cloak back over one shoulder and extends an arm to Certeiras in a self-conscious parody of courtly manners.
"Would you walk with me?" Huiyan asks, and Certeiras's reply is a rich, amused laugh as she takes Huiyan's arm, settling comfortably close alongside her as they begin to stroll through the least devastated areas of the formerly-noble plaza.
"They made medicae supplies on this world," Certeiras comments. "Bandages, mostly."
"I didn't know that," Huiyan replies, lighting up a lho-stick and passing it to Certeiras after a few puffs. She doesn't even know the planet's name, let alone its major exports, but nevertheless it begins to explain why the gods' rivalries have calmed enough to allow their followers to co-operate in conquering it. There is vast theological meaning in bandages, representing as they do the staving-off of inevitable decay, the theft of blood rightfully spilled, the censorship of the wet sensation-space formed by a wound, the defiance of a fate already determined, an endless kaleidoscope of symbolisms which all coalesce into an offence to the gods on an intrinsic, spiritual level.
All the same, Huiyan still keeps a collection of field-dressings and other medicae supplies in her pack. She hopes that her kill-tally will make up for it in the Blood God's estimation.
The city is quieter now, the air beginning to lose the bitter ammoniac tang it has carried for days thanks to the Nurglites' poison gas bombardment early in the battle. Of course, they could have brewed the chymical mixture to be scentless, or to evoke flowers or fresh bread or sweet candies, but they chose to make sure that the loyalists knew exactly what gift was being given to them.
It just shows there are far worse ways to go than a lasbolt, Huiyan thinks. Even after the end of the overt battle there has been a taut, roiling undercurrent of conflict as a process she has witnessed many times before takes hold among the survivors of the planet's inhabitants and defenders. When a world has been conquered, torn free from the suffocating grasp of the Imperium, all of the energy and hatred and fear once directed at the invaders turns inwards instead. An entire planet's worth of lusts and hatreds and desires are suddenly set free after the Corpse-Emperor's strictures dissolve, and it pleases the gods to allow for a certain period of indulgence and rebalancing before a new order is put in place.
In the end, Huiyan knows, the shared knowledge of what they've done during this time of freedom and vengeance will bind the natives of this world to the true gods far more closely than any acolyte's honeyed words or cultic rituals ever could. For her and the rest of her regiment, the binding covenantal act was the killing of their Commissar all those years ago, a figure of unassailable authority somehow transubstantiated into a tired, weak old man who died easily under a hail of lasfire in the end. There can be no step back from a commitment like that.
Certeiras tells her of the Tzeentch cult's actions during the conquest, the subtle infiltration and weakening of the planet's defences in the months and weeks leading up to the invasion. The attack was conceived, she says, by the Iron Warriors, Perturabo's grim, ever-doubting sons, following the cold selfish logic of denying the Imperium a vital source of medicae-supplies and taking it for themselves instead.
There's a self-consciousness, an irony, to this talk. Gnats and mayflies commenting on the acts of great beasts. Neither of them has spent much time in proximity to the Astartes sworn to their respective gods and they are, unspokenly, glad of it.
In the estimation of the Iron Warriors, the religious element, as Certeiras delicately puts it, was only relevant as a way to bring an army of believers along with them. There's a flare of anger in Huiyan's gut, quiet and muted but still there, still smouldering. A feeling of being cheated, somehow. Exploited.
After a few moments she turns to the simplest and most harshly comforting of her faith's axioms - Khorne cares not from where the blood flows, only that it flows. The planet has bled, the weak have suffered and the strong have triumphed. The true natural order of things asserting itself, red in chainsword-tooth and lightning-claw.
Huiyan thinks the situation must feel different for a devotee of the Changer of Ways, though. When she asks about it, Certeiras pauses for so long before answering that Huiyan becomes sure this is it, this is the lie, but she waits and listens all the same.
"Do you think we didn't already know their plans?" she asks, turning to Huiyan with an enigmatic look. "If anything, I admire their guile. In fact-"
Suddenly there's the swift whipcrack of a lasgun, and a patch of exposed rockcrete just behind Certeiras's head is marked with a small, smouldering crater. Certeiras gives an undignified squawk and throws herself behind cover, and although Huiyan spares her a quick glance she's already down and moving, hood up, long-las ready, spidering into a shooting position among the wreckage which gives her a decent amount of concealment as well as a line of sight in the direction the shot came from.
A loyalist, Huiyan thinks with blood singing in her ears, a survivor who has more bravery than sense trying to earn a place beside the Corpse-Emperor's throne. She looks through her scope at a ruined hab-block overlooking the plaza - it's where she would shoot from, if their roles were reversed. She forces herself to slow down, scanning the building for any signs of movement since all but the most foolhardy of sharpshooters will shift positions between shots.
A few moments later she's rewarded by catching a miniscule flash of sunlight moving over a reflective surface, and her initial instinct is that it's her enemy's scope catching the light, but she's wrong - the glint came from one eye-lens of a drab, dirt-coloured gas mask as its wearer risked a moment of direct observation, trying to find Huiyan at the same time as she is looking for him.
"Are you hurt?" Certeiras whispers urgently from somewhere beside her, and Huiyan responds with a single terse shake of her head, unwilling to take her eyes off the target even for a moment.
"No," Huiyan says bluntly, keeping her voice low and quiet. "Krieger in the hab-block across from us. Keep low."
She expects some kind of comment from Certeiras, but the cultist's only response is a single, tense word of agreement. She hunkers down next to Huiyan, joining her in looking at the ruined building. There had been a sizeable contingent of Krieg guardsmen among the world's defenders, who had proven themselves to be every bit as fatalistically determined in battle as their reputation promised.
In all honesty Huiyan had assumed they were all long since dead at this point, and yet here one is, struggling on among the ruins of the city. Even in the long-ago era when Huiyan devoted herself to the Emperor, she had always been unsettled, even disgusted by the soldiers of Krieg. It was only after her oath to the Blood God that she fully understood why, though. The Krieg are not human in anything approaching the symbolic or spiritual meaning of the term. They are, she thinks, the Imperium in microcosm, a legion of empty, expendable puppets to be sacrificed in the Corpse-God's wars.
There is more humanity, more spirit and vibrancy and emotion and desire, in a single claw-tip of the gentle hand Certeiras places on the small of Huiyan's back than there is in the entire population of Krieg.
A few long, silent moments pass. Huiyan thinks she has found the particular area of ruins that the Krieg sniper is hiding in, and sometimes she even sees what could be the silhouette of his lasrifle or the angular outline of his helmet. Even so, she's unwilling to risk a shot yet - a miss would give away her position, drawing her enemy's eye straight to her.
So, she waits and watches, knowing that somewhere out there the Krieger is doing the same while Certeiras, unused to the silent cold-sweat tension of sniper combat, shifts uneasily beside her.
And then it starts to rain, a thin cloying drizzle that leaves an acrid chemical aftertaste when it settles on Huiyan's dry lips. Her camo-cloak is waterproofed and in any case she has endured far worse in order to make a kill, but she knows, in a cold, detached, pit-of-the-stomach way, that Certeiras is not so fortunate, doesn't have the same ability to tough it out.
Her talents lie elsewhere, and in almost any other setting Huiyan is sure Certeiras would outdo her, but the fact is that lying perfectly still for hours at a time on top of jagged chunks of destroyed hab-block while slowly but surely being soaked to the skin is Huiyan's singular domain, one among many of the practical skills she has developed as a sniper. She has always had a sharpshooter's mind, too, able to observe and think through a shot in a way that has never failed her yet.
So she thinks it through now, even as the acrid rain gathers and condenses in drops along the edge of her hood. She has learned enough about the Krieg to know that her antagonist has already proven himself as an experienced warrior simply by surviving long enough to be inducted into the Guard and sent offworld. She must assume, then, that he is at least her equal in skill, and act accordingly.
Huiyan's subsequent conclusions form one after the other, as inevitably and immutably as the movements of the stars. Her enemy is as focused and single-minded an opponent as the False Emperor's armies could ever provide, but even so she is confident that, under her usual circumstances, she could best him. But these are not her usual circumstances, not with Certeiras there. Usually she hunts alone, or sometimes with a spotter whose skills she trusts, but the cultist has already barely escaped death once and Huiyan knows that the danger to Certeiras will throw her off, split her focus. It will doom her if she lets it.
Still no movement through her scope, and no signs that the Krieger has seen her, and so she remains unmoving, watchful, continuing to think. She ignores the slow, uncanny trickle of blood from within her long-las's casing as the weapon's machine-spirit seethes at the delay.
With time to prepare she could have brought a decoy with her, of the sort which have existed for as long as there have been snipers to use them. Even something as simple as a helmet lifted up on a stick could work to bait her opponent into revealing himself. He must be tired, she thinks, probably alone, definitely outnumbered, experiencing whatever mental distress Kriegers are capable of suffering, and clearly he is eager to kill the Emperor's foes. He would act quickly if given the chance to take another clear shot and end their combat outright.
"You need a decoy," Certeiras murmurs quietly, and not for the first time Huiyan wonders if she can sense her thoughts, or if she has simply considered their situation and arrived at the same conclusion using her own perceptiveness. With Certeiras, either is believable.
The cultist pulls away from her, moving as if to stand up in the open and suddenly there's a coldness in Huiyan's stomach which has nothing to do with the rain. She slides back from her shooting position, reaches out to grab her, drag her back, to do something to stop Certeiras.
"Don't," Huiyan whispers urgently, "it's not -" and it feels like the word she's about to say is fair or right, because she doesn't deserve this, there's no reason why Certeiras should consider sacrificing herself for her, but she's silenced by a quick what in the name of all the gods are you talking about sort of look, made all the more effective by the additional eyes Certeiras has to express it with.
Instead of rising to her feet Certeiras stays hunkered down, under cover, and starts to whisper a gentle rhythmic incantation, one hand on the cover of the sorcerous tome she carries. A thin rime of warp-frost gathers on the book, sublimating into a bluish haze wherever the raindrops land on it.
A clawed avian hand makes contact with Huiyan's shoulder, and she has the disconcerting experience of seeing herself pulling away from her own body, jerkily crawling towards an open spot nearby. It takes Huiyan a few moments to understand that she's seeing an illusory image, not a solid entity but an imperfect projection of one possible future, one possible course of action selected from an infinity of others.
The image is not perfect. It seems to possess only an arrangement of simplistic, gaping voids instead of a face, for example, and the colours of its uniform and camo-cloak look aberrant or distorted somehow, but even so it will seem real enough at a distance, or through the narrow aperture of a lasrifle scope.
Huiyan moves forward slowly, cautiously, back into her firing position, and Certeiras moves with her, maintaining the physical contact that seems to let her project this other puppet-Huiyan into their present reality. The touch is oddly reassuring, supportive, an unspoken reminder of Certeiras's presence alongside her.
She settles herself back behind the scope of her long-las, returning her view to where she thinks the Krieg sniper is hiding. She will only get one chance at this, the single moment of clarity when her enemy fires at the decoy. He'll shift positions again immediately afterwards, making Certeiras's effort a total waste, and for some irrational reason it's that thought, rather than the vast danger they're in, which irritates Huiyan the most. She will not miss.
The decoy image of herself rises into a crouch, aiming in a direction that exposes her head and the side of her body to the Krieger's position, and exactly as Huiyan expected her opponent doesn't hesitate to fire.
The muzzle-flash of his weapon comes from a shadowed area back and to the left of where she thought he was, the tiny circle of his gas mask's eye-lens illuminated for a split second in hellish red as it reflects the lasbolt's light. That single momentary flash is enough for Huiyan to aim and squeeze the trigger of her long-las by sheer muscle-memory alone, and her own las round punches through the Krieger's gas mask just below the eyepiece.
He crumples down onto the rubble, emptily, all muscular control instantly converted to inert deadweight. Huiyan waits for a moment, watching, sees a puttee-wrapped leg twitch once and then remain still forever.
"You really thought I was going to let him shoot me," Certeiras says a short time later as she waits for Huiyan to slice off a piece of the dead Krieger's coat as a kill-trophy. It's a plain, clear statement with no hint of a question, but nevertheless Huiyan answers it like one.
"Yes," she says gruffly, not looking up from her work.
"That would be a very un-Tzeentchian impulse for me to have," Certeiras muses, clicking her claw-fingers pensively against one another. "Very un-Tzeentchian indeed."
She pauses for a moment and when she continues, her voice is rich and warm with amusement.
"How fortunate that we are only human."
The look in all of her eyes as she watches Huiyan tie the trophy around the barrel of her long-las is something very much like love.