Die Raben des Morasts

Forms of Address / Cascade of Titles

Chapter Maxim

Without sound. The virtue of concealment, last inheritance of the Raven Guard. The Neophyte learns it in the bilges of the ships, where every noise has betrayed a brother who no longer lives.

Every hull. The virtue of resolve. No bulkhead counts as closed, only as not yet opened. The Neophyte cuts his first bulkhead blind, his eyes bound, under the supervision of a Sergeant.

No dead. The virtue of loyalty, which broke the Chapter. Every fallen brother is counted, named, carried. The Neophyte learns the names of four hundred dead before he receives his own bolter.

Never give up. The virtue of endurance, today the gift of the Grandfather. The Neophyte learns that pain is a burden one does not set down but shares, until it belongs to no one.

Distinction

Plague, a dead world and stubborn endurance lead many to think of the Death Guard. There is no geneseed kinship; the resemblance is the convergent development of the same despair. The Ravens bear the inheritance of the Raven Guard, and their silence is Corax's silence, even in decay.

Register of Locations in the Fortress-Monastery

Overview

The formations of the Ravens are called Eyries, because each is bound to a ship that is at once its nest, its grave and its armoury. An Eyrie never leaves its ship permanently; if the ship is lost, the Eyrie is dissolved and distributed among the remaining Eyries.

Krallenhorst

The oldest brothers in Terminator armour, aboard the battle barge of the Eyrie-Father. They board only flagships; their boarding ram bears the banner that has never been removed.

Horst Grauflut

The heaviest line Eyrie. It holds corridors while others break through to the reactor. Sergeant Dravonis Kaltroven, leader of squad "Vrakoth", is currently seconded with his squad to Horst Moderfeder.

"A corridor is a throat. I hold it shut." — Sergeant Dravonis Kaltroven

On the raider frigate off Ystrel, Kaltroven held a junction for forty minutes against three waves and, even under fire, carved the names of two fallen into his forearm.

Horst Moderfeder

The fastest Eyrie, with Caestus assault rams and a strike cruiser. Captain Kaelith Blakfen leads the boarding force the Chapter currently deploys most often, accompanied by Chaplain Aldeth Draskorn and the Ironclad Dreadnought Vrocken. The force includes the squads "Skreoth" under Sergeant Duskaine Skantrel, "Krendal" under Sergeant Kaelith Kelgrach and the Scouts "Drekoval" under Veteran Sergeant Tholvirn Ghrenak.

Off Ystrel, Blakfen had a burning deck flooded to trap a Harlequin, and in doing so lost the squad he had meant to save.

Horst Sumpfkehle

Specialised in space hulks and abandoned stations. It remains longest in enemy hulls; its brothers reach the fen-grey earliest.

"A wreck is never empty. Only not yet counted." — Sergeant Kaelith Kelgrach

On a wreck, Kelgrach's Hellblasters burned out a chamber full of spores and struck their own Apothecary in doing so, whose name Kelgrach has borne on his plasma casing ever since; he currently serves with his squad in Horst Moderfeder.

Bruthorst

Holds the Schwarzhorst and oversees the Immersion Pit. All Librarians and most Apothecaries serve here.

Kielwasser

Brothers in the keel-passage, led by an Elder. They are set into hulls no one wishes to reclaim.

Keep To It

The warrior who commands the entire Chapter bears the title Eyrie-Father.

Eyrie-Father Sarrun Vellach

Eyrie-Father since 903.M37, the first to lead the Chapter after the Fall. Vellach stands in the fen-grey and has not removed his helm for eighty years; his voice sounds wet. He wears a suit of master-crafted armour whose seals have grown over with grey, and a power axe with a blade of Morvainer silt-iron.

On the bridge of the raider cruiser off Ystrel, Vellach did not cut the captain down. He sat down beside him and recited to him the dead of his own crew until the man stopped breathing of his own accord.

Chapter Master Oderic Vaile

The founder, fallen 509.M36. Vaile rewrote the Companies into Eyries and introduced the Counting, then intended as a duty of honour. His power armour stands in the Hall of the Counted, without its helm, its plates so densely engraved that the black is barely visible. His chainsword was melted down into the censer of the first Elder of the Kielwasser.

During his last boarding, Vaile remained on the burning reactor deck of an Ork Rok until he had carried out all eleven fallen. The twelfth he no longer carried himself.

Captain Kaelith Blakfen

Captain of Horst Moderfeder, commander of the fastest boarding force. Blakfen stands in the Blanching and does not know it. He carries a storm shield and bolt pistol, with 312 names carved into the shield. He is the last Captain who still prays to the Emperor before a boarding, quietly, out of habit.

"I no longer know to whom I owe the prayer. I speak it anyway." — Captain Kaelith Blakfen

Off Ystrel, he had a Harlequin set adrift from the airlock instead of killing it, so that it might tell its masque that the Ravens still count.

Chaplain Aldeth Draskorn

Draskorn bears a crozius with a raven skull, from whose eye sockets moss grows. He never preaches; he whispers to the brothers, one by one, the names of their dead until they stop weeping. Among his peers he is regarded as the most faithful of the Chapter.

When a Neophyte collapsed in a captured cargo hold, Draskorn laid his hand on the youth's helm and spoke names for thirteen hours while the fighting raged around them.

Morvaine is running out for the Chapter. Since the Fall the swamp tribes die more slowly, but they scarcely bear children any longer who survive an encounter with the Ghellik; the Grandfather blesses the brothers, and the blessing seeps through the silt into the settlements. In the last century the Immersion Pit accepted a third of the Aspirants of earlier times, and of these, half did not survive the submersion.

The Eyrie-Father knows it. The Apothecaries of the Bruthorst know it, for they keep the book of admission, and they have presented the figures twice. Chaplain Aldeth Draskorn teaches that brothers who do not die need no replacement. Captain Kaelith Blakfen regards this as a calculation a Chapter can make only once.

The strength of 1,480 brothers deceives. Eighty stand in the Kielwasser, several hundred in the Blanching or in the fen-grey. Every brother who does not die merely draws closer to the third stage. The Chapter is not growing smaller. It is growing older, greyer, slower, and in a few centuries the Hall of the Counted will receive no new plates, because no one will fall who was young enough to be counted.

The Eyrie-Father has deferred the question in the council of Captains three times. It remains on the table.

The Audience

The transport had been drifting for nine days. No vox, no lights, only a faint heat signature in the cargo hold that the auspex read as human. Captain Kaelith Blakfen let the ramship glide in without drive, as the Chapter had always done.

The bulkhead gave way without a sound. Sergeant Duskaine Skantrel went first, "Skreoth" behind him, bolters lowered. Blakfen followed with Chaplain Aldeth Draskorn.

A smell hung in the corridor that Blakfen knew and did not wish to name: sweetish, warm, of bilge. He opened his hand, two fingers: onward.

They were sitting in the cargo hold. Four hundred people, perhaps more, on crates and sacks, pilgrims, faces in the greenish glow of the emergency lighting. They sat in rows. They all looked in the same direction.

At the front, on a stage of cargo pallets, stood a suit of power armour. Green-black, with a bone-white beaked faceplate. Empty. Someone had set it up like a puppet, arms spread wide, and names had been scratched into the knee.

Blakfen read them. They were the names of his squad. The squad he had drowned before Ystrel.

"They were here," said Skantrel. He spoke, though the bulkhead had long since fallen, and still it sounded like a transgression.

A woman in the front row turned around. Her eyes were reddened, her lips grey. "You came," she said. "They said you would come. They showed us. How you forget."

"Who?" asked Blakfen.

"The Dancers." She smiled, and a thread of mucus ran down her chin. "They played us the end. And then they left and said the end would now come by itself."

Draskorn stepped past Blakfen, slowly. Behind the raven skull of his helm his breathing could be heard, wet and calm.

"They are sick," he said. "All of them. For days. The ship carried them to Ystrel, and from there to here."

Blakfen knew what that meant. The pilgrim stations, the spectators. The Grandfather had caught up with them on the way back. Or the Chapter had brought him along and left him here without noticing.

"We cannot take them with us," said Skantrel.

"No," said Draskorn. "We can count them."

He walked along the rows and laid his hand on each head. He asked for the name. The people said it, some whispering, some weeping, and Draskorn repeated every name, quietly, like a prayer. A child asked whether it would stop hurting now. Draskorn said the pain would soon no longer belong to it alone.

Blakfen watched. He thought of the litany he still spoke before every boarding, of the Emperor, of the Throne, of a light he had not seen in seventy years. He thought that these people would have worshipped him, had he come a hundred years earlier. He thought that perhaps they still did.

"Captain," said Skantrel. "The armour."

Blakfen went to the front. Behind the empty armour a mask lay on the pallets. White, smooth, half a laughing face, half a weeping one. Beside it a data-slate, not Imperial. A single word in Low Gothic, crooked, as if written by a hand that loathed such letters:

"Applause."

He took the mask and turned it over. A name was scratched into the inside. His own.

Behind him Draskorn began to speak the names from the beginning, all four hundred and twelve, in rhythm, and the sick spoke with him, faintly, a choir in the green light. Something in the transport's bilge hummed.

"What do we do with them?" asked Skantrel.

Blakfen laid the mask back down. He drew his combat knife and began to scratch the names into the inside of his shield, one after another, as fast as Draskorn spoke them.

"We do not forget them," he said.

It was the truth. It was the only thing the Chapter could still do. And when they sealed the bulkhead behind them and let the transport drift, all four hundred and twelve were still alive, and none of them would ever wholly die again.

Somewhere in the Web of the Thousand Gates, Blakfen believed, someone was laughing.

He kept counting.