An hour had passed. The white in the atmosphere was starting to fade.
I was sitting on a Disk in midair, watching as the city below crumbled like sand castles falling to time. Massive craters were opening in the ground as durasteel fractured and fell, eroding superstructures collapsed, and the works of man tumbled down, one after another. Impossibly strong materials shattered like brittle glass and clay, and the ground for miles around was crunching, crushing, and settling as the corrupted material was cleansed and collapsed, and the weight of ages did the rest of the job.
Well, the Mekkers won't have to clean up the planet, I thought with a smile. I wonder how much money I saved them.
"Yeah, I know you're awake." The fool on the other Disk slowly opened his eyes. "I also got rid of the seven kill-switches in you. They even figured out to put a suicide-urge inside your Helix. Your bosses are pretty damn good."
Completely nude, the Assassin slowly sat up on the Disk. We were a few hundred yards above the ground, out of the collapse paths of anything tall, while the booming and rumbling of a kiloplex dying and returning to the dust echoed around us. We were just above the dust clouds, actually.
"Feel insane?" I asked, as he stared at the gloomy yet grand scene below, pretty poetic in its own way. The constant peals couldn't stop my voice, of course.
"No. I can feel... I can feel... something great and powerful... that is not the Warp..." He put his hands to his chest, and his Helices spun out.
The flames and smoke of his Helices were brighter and more tangible then ever, sampling the world without first being filtered through his bodyglove.
"That is The Land." He looked at me curiously. "Us normal folks don't know what it is, only the Brothers of the Void know that... Brother Firesword. Fate, luck, destiny, the will of the universe, of life itself, the unconscious drive of existence... it's what vivus feeds, maybe Creation itself. There's a lot of people who claim to be able to sense it, but only the Brotherhood of the Void actually can.
"It'll never talk to you, but you won't have any problem interpreting what it wants, if past experience is anything."
He took a deep breath, and something lit up inside his dark eyes. "It is... angry..." He lifted his head towards the sky, looking in a specific direction.
"The Land loves her Brothers," I agreed, glancing up there. "Having them enslaved and corrupted by mortal wills... well, the Land isn't going to be too happy about that." I smiled slightly. "On the realistic side, you can be very, very sure your masters have been hunted by Void Brothers before, and they are ready for you. It's a job you should probably leave to someone else, while you get about doing what you really need to."
He lowered his eyes to me. "Leave freeing my Brothers... to you?"
"What's the Land say?"
He inhaled deeply again, and closed his eyes as his Helices swirled and danced in unfettered freedom.
"That... seems like a very good idea," he breathed out after a full minute.
"The Land is pretty merciless," I informed him. "I know you want to do the job yourself, but the Land wants the job done, full stop. Everything else is secondary."
"I... see." He looked at the slowly crumbling grandeur about him. "The others?"
"I had to haul their unconscious carcasses to their skimmer and fly it out of there before it all came crumbling down. They're probably conscious and wondering how they got fifty miles thataway on autopilot about now."
He quirked a half-smile. "You are too heroic."
"And don't I Throne-damned know it," I grinned. "Of course, I did just slaughter over a billion Warped, denied their souls to the Warp, turned all the power they invested here into a Veil-sealing dead zone the Warp won't be able to intrude in for centuries, and blamed the whole thing on the Mechanists. I can indulge in meaninglessly nice shit every now and then."
"I... see." He considered everything from that angle as he watched a blok a half-mile away begin to shudder and crumble. Slowly and grandly, two thousand feet of reinforced durasteel and plascrete began to slough away, joining the rest of the falling artificial forest. "You... cost the Warp a great deal here..."
"That is by far the best part of my job," I grinned even wider.
He looked at my double canines, the smearing pattern my Curse. "What... is that?" he had to ask.
"Residual Curse-mark. I'm a Hagchild. I could get rid of it, but it's too useful, so I keep it around. Since its original intent was to punish Evil souls, it's drawn to them like wolves to sheep. It's how I knew to follow the trail of sigils. There just had to be something juicy at the end of all that, and let me tell you, it is thrumming most happily right now."
"And how are you resisting my Helices?" They swirled my way, but couldn't break my Null outside my Vajra at all.
"My Null is stronger than your Void." He stared at me. "Three types of Forsaken... well, four, technically. Nulls, the common type, what most people are if Awakened. Sources, the Kings Among Men and Queens Among Women, who lead the Nulls. Vortexes, the female Voids, who hunt corruption... and the Voids, who guide the way in service to the Land."
He kind of stared at me, and I just arched an eyebrow back.
"You have met free Voids..."
"Yes."
"And... they are established. They have... an order?"
"Nothing as formal as an assassin's organization. But they do help one another in their various jobs."
His eyes fell to his Helices. "You called me Brother Firesword."
"You have Smoke and Fire Helices. Those are the signs of the Fire and the Sword. As I understand it, you're the generalist of the Void Brothers. You take on all the problems and help the other Brothers out, while being opposed to use of corrupt energies in general. You and Brother Shadowknife tend to be the most active of the Brothers."
"Shadowknife?" he had to ask.
"Their Helices are Time and Space. They are the guardians of the Veil. Things from other planes, time travelers, things from Outside Creation, dimensional instability... they hunt them down and clean up the problems, the shadows upon Creation. They are despised by some very, very powerful entities." I had to inhale proudly. "This universe hasn't had any for at least ten millennia. It probably wouldn't be such a shithole if they had been here." I slid my eyes back to him. "History lesson for me. Did the Emperor set up the Assassins?"
His face stiffened, and he looked elsewhere again. "So I was told..."
I grimaced. "Fuck. The Emperor is responsible for suborning the Void Brothers? No wonder this place is so crapsack. The best weapons against the Warp, cuffed and shackled..."
The most powerful psion to ever live had struck at the Void Brotherhood as they were born, and was probably simply too powerful and essential to be snuffed in return. Give it a few hundred years, and likely most of the 'real' Voids had died off to ever-increasing dangers, while the Emperor conscripted those meant to replace them.
"I can feel... that there is so much to do..." His eyes were a little round, as if he was gazing at a wall of work that extended out into infinity.
"And that's why you have Sources and Nulls around. Delegate. You're the hands of the only thing vast enough to counter what has been done and is going to be done. There's key stuff only you can do, because only you are sensitive enough to the Land. But the Big Stuff... well, the Land has Nulls and Sources for a damn reason, you know?" I gestured at the stuff coming around. "We can do stuff, just point the way. You Brothers aren't really supposed to be engaging in mass slaughter all the time... you are supposed to be working the tipping points, removing the key elements of the enemy to shift things one way or another as the big forces ripple one way and the other.
"You've been used as a chess piece, when in fact, you're supposed to be the ones playing the game."
He looked over the crumbling cityscape, seeing and feeling things moving with every falling brick and shattering window. "We are the hands of the Land..."
"Oh, would you like to speak with some of your other Brothers? Experience gives insights, and they are rediscovering the heritage you've been denied. Brothers... are the favored children of the Land. Being an assassin is a small part of what they are and can be."
"I can do that? How?"
"I put a Mark on your hand." He turned his hands over, and there it was, on his left hand. His Helices swirled through it, but it was inert. "Touch it to this here matching Master Mark on my waist, and there'll be some changes."
He looked at his hand, and this time I let this Helices sweep through my Null, feel my Vajra, and his face changed as he did so.
"You... that's magic..."
"And?"
"It's pure, untainted by the Warp..."
"Just like you can do."
He grimaced again, like a stab of pain in his soul at how he'd been used, and denied so much. He leaned the Disk sideways, and scooted over, reaching out with the back of his hand to place it against my Waist.
Magic hissed, Karma dumped, the Mark lit up.
He blinked, looked at the door in the side of his mind, walked up, and pushed it open.
I /glanced over at him. -Good morning, Brother.-
His jaw slowly dropped. He looked around at the mindscape, back at me, and a score of other doors opened up, and out walked some presences both completely new and totally familiar.
-Brother Firesword,- My Queen /said for all of them, stepping forwards, his Mind and Spirit Helices swirling about him. -Welcome to the Markspace for the Void Brothers. We have a great deal to talk about.-
------
"Why are we taking a transport off-world?" the new Brother Firesword asked, as I clicked bars and switches of the private shuttle buried in the private hanger of a noble family whose members had probably been impaled on the crumbled gate outside.
"Normally I'd Riftcut my way offworld, but this place has just received a freaking massive infusion of vivic energy, and the Veil is like adamant. The Warp isn't the only thing not getting through here. So, we have to get offworld, and we have to do it in a manner where you aren't seen, so they can think you are dead after failing to kill me."
"Since you didn't leave me with the others you obviously rescued..." he nodded.
"So, we're going to go up in space beyond the world's magnetosphere, Riftcut our way out of here, and the transport wagon one of my girls is aboard can tractor it in and get a free ship for nothing."
"Clever. And then, where are we going?"
"You need to Level. So, someplace you can do that. Then, you're going to go hunting Assassins for recruitment."
"Will I be able to find them?"
"You know how you can always track one another because of the purity you leave behind?" He had that look of being amazed that I knew that once again. "Well, the Land always knows where you are, which means it can always lead you to one of your own. You just never knew it because that suit stopped the empathy.
"It would be very accurate to say... you cannot hide from one another."