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PART ONE. THE DECEIVED
ONE
Blood from misunderstanding
Our brethren in ignorance
The Emperor dies
'I WAS THERE.' he would say afterwards, until afterwards became a time quite devoid of laughter. 'I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.' It was a delicious conceit, and his comrades would chuckle at the sheer treason of it.
The story was a good one. Torgaddon would usually be the one to cajole him into telling it, for Torgaddon was the joker, a man of mighty laughter and idiot tricks. And Loken would tell it again, a tale rehearsed through so many retellings, it almost told itself.
Loken was always careful to make sure his audience properly understood the irony in his story. It was likely that he felt some shame about his complicity in the matter itself, for it was a case of blood spilled from misunderstanding. There was a great tragedy implicit in the tale of the Emperor's murder, a tragedy that Loken always wanted his listeners to appreciate. But the death of Sejanus was usually all that fixed their attentions.
That, and the punchline.
It had been, as far as the warp-dilated horologs could attest, the two hundred and third year of the Great Crusade. Loken always set his story in its proper time and place. The commander had been Warmaster for about a year, since the triumphant conclusion of the Ullanor campaign, and he was anxious to prove his new-found status, particularly in the eyes of his brothers.
Warmaster. Such a tide. The fit was still new and unnatural, not yet worn in.
It was a strange time to be abroad amongst stars. They had been doing what they had been doing for two centuries, but now it felt unfamiliar. It was a start of things. And an ending too.
The ships of the 63rd Expedition came upon the Imperium by chance. A sudden etheric storm, later declared providential by Maloghurst, forced a route alteration, and they translated into the edges of a system comprising nine worlds.
Nine worlds, circling a yellow sun.
Detecting the shoal of rugged expedition warships on station at the out-system edges, the Emperor first demanded to know their occupation and agenda. Then he painstakingly corrected what he saw as the multifarious errors in their response.
Then he demanded fealty.
He was, he explained, the Emperor of Mankind. He had stoically shepherded his people through the miserable epoch of warp storms, through the Age of Strife, staunchly maintaining the rule and law of man. This had been expected of him, he declared. He had kept the flame of human culture alight through the aching isolation of Old Night. He had sustained this precious, vital fragment, and kept it intact, until such time as the scattered diaspora of humanity re-established contact. He rejoiced that such a time was now at hand. His soul leapt to see the orphan ships returning to the heart of the Imperium. Everything was ready and waiting. Everything had been preserved. The orphans would be embraced to his bosom, and then the Great Scheme of rebuilding would begin, and the Imperium of Mankind would stretch itself out again across the stars, as was its birthright.
As soon as they showed him proper fealty. As Emperor. Of mankind.
The commander, quite entertained by all accounts, sent Hastur Sejanus to meet with the Emperor and deliver greeting.
Sejanus was the commander's favourite. Not as proud or irascible as Abaddon, nor as ruthless as Sedirae, nor even as solid and venerable as Iacton Qruze, Sejanus was the perfect captain, tempered evenly in all respects. A warrior and a diplomat in equal measure, Sejanus's martial record, second only to Abaddon's, was easily forgotten when in company with the man himself. A beautiful man, Loken would say, building his tale, a beautiful man adored by all. 'No finer figure in Mark IV plate than Hastur Sejanus. That he is remembered, and his deeds celebrated, even here amongst us, speaks of Sejanus's qualities. The noblest hero of the Great Crusade.' That was how Loken would describe him to the eager listeners. 'In future times, he will be recalled with such fondness that men will name their sons after him.'
Sejanus, with a squad of his finest warriors from the Fourth Company, travelled in-system in a gilded barge, and was received for audience by the Emperor at his palace on the third planet.
And killed.
Murdered. Hacked down on the onyx floor of the palace even as he stood before the Emperor's golden throne. Sejanus and his glory squad - Dymos, Malsan-dar, Gorthoi and the rest - all slaughtered by the Emperor's elite guard, the so-called Invisibles.
Apparently, Sejanus had not offered the correct fealty. Indelicately, he had suggested there might actually be another Emperor.
The commander's grief was absolute. He had loved Sejanus like a son. They had warred side by side to affect compliance on a hundred worlds. But the commander, always sanguine and wise in such matters, told his signal men to offer the Emperor another chance. The commander detested resorting to war, and always sought alternative paths away from violence, where such were workable. This was a mistake, he reasoned, a terrible, terrible mistake. Peace could be salvaged. This 'Emperor' could be made to understand.
It was about then, Loken liked to add, that a suggestion of quote marks began to appear around the 'Emperor's' name.
It was determined that a second embassy would be despatched. Maloghurst volunteered at once. The commander agreed, but ordered the speartip forwards into assault range. The intent was clear: one hand extended open, in peace, the other held ready as a fist. If the second embassy failed, or was similarly met with violence, then the fist would already be in position to strike. That sombre day, Loken said, the honour of the speartip had fallen, by the customary drawing of lots, to the strengths of Abaddon, Torgaddon, 'Little Horus' Aximand. And Loken himself.
At the order, battle musters began. The ships of the speartip slipped forward, running under obscurement. On board, stormbirds were hauled onto their launch carriages. Weapons were issued and certified. Oaths of moment were sworn and witnessed. Armour was machined into place around the anointed bodies of the chosen.
In silence, tensed and ready to be unleashed, the speartip watched as the shuttle convoy bearing Maloghurst and his envoys arced down towards the third planet. Surface batteries smashed them out of the heavens. As the burning scads of debris from Maloghurst's flotilla billowed away into the atmosphere, the 'Emperor's' fleet elements rose up out of the oceans, out of the high cloud, out of the gravity wells of nearby moons. Six hundred warships, revealed and armed for war.
Abaddon broke obscurement and made a final, personal plea to the 'Emperor', beseeching him to see sense. The warships began to fire on Abaddon's speartip.
'My commander.' Abaddon relayed to the heart of the waiting fleet, 'there is no dealing here. This fool imposter will not listen.'
And the commander replied, 'Illuminate him, my son, but spare all you can. That order not withstanding, avenge the blood of my noble Sejanus. Decimate this "Emperor's" elite murderers, and bring the imposter to me.'
'And so.' Loken would sigh, 'we made war upon our brethren, so lost in ignorance.'
IT WAS LATE evening, but the sky was saturated with light. The phototropic towers of the High City, built to turn and follow the sun with their windows during the day, shifted uneasily at the pulsating radiance in the heavens. Spectral shapes swam high in the upper atmosphere: ships engaging in a swirling mass, charting brief, nonsensical zodiacs with the beams of their battery weapons.
At ground level, around the wide, basalt platforms that formed the skirts of the palace, gunfire streamed through the air like horizontal rain, hosing coils of tracer fire that dipped and slithered heavily like snakes, die-straight zips of energy that vanished as fast as they appeared, and flurries of bolt shells like blizzarding hail. Downed stormbirds, many of them crippled and burning, littered twenty square kilometres of the landscape.
Black, humanoid figures paced slowly in across the limits of the palace sprawl. They were shaped like armoured men, and they trudged like men, but they were giants, each one hundred and forty metres tall. The Mechanicum had deployed a half-dozen of its Titan war engines. Around the Titans' soot-black ankles, troops flooded forward in a breaking wave three kilometres wide.
The Luna Wolves surged like the surf of the wave, thousands of gleaming white figures bobbing and running forward across the skirt platforms, detonations bursting amongst them, lifting rippling fireballs and trees of dark brown smoke. Each blast juddered the ground with a gritty thump, and showered down dirt as an after-curse. Assault craft swept in over their heads, low, between the shambling frames of the wide-spaced Titans, fanning the slowly lifting smoke clouds into sudden, energetic vortices.
Every Astartes helmet was filled with vox-chatter: snapping voices, chopping back and forth, their tonal edges roughened by the transmission quality.
It was Loken's first taste of mass war since Ullanor. Tenth Company's first taste too. There had been skirmishes and scraps, but nothing testing. Loken was glad to see that his cohort hadn't grown rusty. The unapologetic regimen of live drills and punishing exercises he'd maintained had kept them whetted as sharp and serious as the terms of the oaths of moment they had taken just hours before.
Ullanor had been glorious, a hard, unstinting slog to dislodge and overthrow a bestial empire. The greenskin had been a pernicious and resilient foe, but they had broken his back and kicked over the embers of his revel fires.
The commander had won the field through the employment of his favourite, practiced strategy: the speartip thrust to tear out the throat. Ignoring the green-skin masses, which had outnumbered the crusaders five to one, the com |
s of moment they had taken just hours before.
Ullanor had been glorious, a hard, unstinting slog to dislodge and overthrow a bestial empire. The greenskin had been a pernicious and resilient foe, but they had broken his back and kicked over the embers of his revel fires.
The commander had won the field through the employment of his favourite, practiced strategy: the speartip thrust to tear out the throat. Ignoring the green-skin masses, which had outnumbered the crusaders five to one, the commander had struck directly at the Overlord and his command coterie, leaving the enemy headless and without direction.
The same philosophy operated here. Tear out the throat and let the body spasm and die. Loken and his men, and the war engines that supported them, were the edge of the blade unsheathed for that purpose.
But this was not like Ullanor at all. No thickets of mud and clay-built ramparts, no ramshackle fortresses of bare metal and wire, no black powder air bursts or howling ogre-foes. This was not a barbaric brawl determined by blades and upper body strength.
This was modern warfare in a civilised place. This was man against man, inside the monolithic precincts of a cultured people. The enemy possessed ordnance and firearms every bit the technological match of the Legio forces, and the skill and training to use them. Through the green imaging of his visor, Loken saw armoured men with energy weapons ranged against them in the lower courses of the palace. He saw tracked weapon carriages, automated artillery; nests of four or even eight automatic cannons shackled together on cart platforms that lumbered forward on hydraulic legs.
Not like Ullanor at all. That had been an ordeal. This would be a test. Equal against equal. Like against like.
Except that for all its martial technologies, the enemy lacked one essential quality, and that quality was locked within each and every case of Mark IV power armour: the genetically enhanced flesh and blood of the Imperial Astartes. Modified, refined, post-human, the Astartes were superior to anything they had met or would ever meet. No fighting force in the galaxy could ever hope to match the Legions, unless the stars went out, and madness ruled, and lawful sense turned upside down. For, as Sedirae had once said, The only thing that can beat an Astartes is another Astartes', and they had all laughed at that. The impossible was nothing to be scared of.
The enemy - their armour a polished magenta trimmed in silver, as Loken later discovered when he viewed them with his helmet off - firmly held the induction gates into the inner palace. They were big men, tall, thick through the chest and shoulders, and at the peak of fitness. Not one of them, not even the tallest, came up to the chin of one of the Luna Wolves. It was like fighting children.
Well-armed children, it had to be said.
Through the billowing smoke and the jarring detonations, Loken led the veteran First Squad up the steps at a run, the plasteel soles of their boots grating on the stone: First Squad, Tenth Company, Hellebore Tactical Squad, gleaming giants in pearl-white armour, the wolf head insignia stark black on their auto-responsive shoulder plates. Crossfire zig-zagged around them from the defended gates ahead. The night air shimmered with the heat distortion of weapons discharge. Some kind of upright, automated mortar was casting a sluggish, flaccid stream of fat munition charges over their heads.
'Kill it!' Loken heard Brother-sergeant Jubal instruct over the link. Jubal's order was given in the curt argot of Cthonia, their derivation world, a language that the Luna Wolves had preserved as their battle-tongue.
The battle-brother carrying the squad's plasma cannon obeyed without hesitation. For a dazzling half-second, a twenty-metre ribbon of light linked the muzzle of his weapon to the auto-mortar, and then the device engulfed the facade of the palace in a roasting wash of yellow flame.
Dozens of enemy soldiers were cast down by the blast. Several were thrown up into the air, landing crumpled and boneless on the flight of steps.
'Into them!' Jubal barked.
Wildfire chipped and pattered off their armour. Loken felt the distant sting of it. Brother Calends stumbled and fell, but righted himself again, almost at once.
Loken saw the enemy scatter away from their charge. He swung his bolter up. His weapon had a gash in the metal of the foregrip, the legacy of a greenskin's axe during Ullanor, a cosmetic mark Loken had told the armourers not to finish out. He began to fire, not on burst, but on single shot, feeling the weapon buck and kick against his palms. Bolter rounds were explosive penetrators. The men he hit popped like blisters, or shredded like bursting fruit. Pink mist fumed off every ruptured figure as it fell.
Tenth Company!' Loken shouted. 'For the Warmaster!'
The warcry was still unfamiliar, just another aspect of the newness. It was the first time Loken had declaimed it in war, the first chance he'd had since the honour had been bestowed by the Emperor after Ullanor.
By the Emperor. The true Emperor.
'Lupercal! Lupercal!' the Wolves yelled back as they streamed in, choosing to answer with the old cry, the Legion's pet-name for their beloved commander. The warhorns of the Titans boomed.
They stormed the palace. Loken paused by one of the induction gates, urging his frontrunners in, carefully reviewing the advance of his company main force. Hellish fire continued to rake them from the upper balconies and towers. In the far distance, a brilliant dome of light suddenly lifted into the sky, astonishingly bright and vivid. Loken's visor automatically dimmed. The ground trembled and a noise like a thunderclap reached him. A capital ship of some size, stricken and ablaze, had fallen out of the sky and impacted in the outskirts of the High City. Drawn by the flash, the phototropic towers above him fidgeted and rotated.
Reports flooded in. Aximand's force, Fifth Company, had secured the Regency and the pavilions on the ornamental lakes to the west of the High City. Torgaddon's men were driving up through the lower town, slaying the armour sent to block them.
Loken looked east. Three kilometres away, across the flat plain of the basalt platforms, across the tide of charging men and striding Titans and stitching fire, Abaddon's company, First Company, was crossing the bulwarks into the far flank of the palace. Loken magnified his view, resolving hundreds of white-armoured figures pouring through the smoke and chop-fire. At the front of them, the dark figures of First Company's foremost Terminator squad, the Justaerin. They wore polished black armour, dark as night, as if they belonged to some other, black Legion.
'Loken to First,' he sent. Tenth has entry.'
There was a pause, a brief distort, then Abaddon's voice answered. 'Loken, Loken... are you trying to shame me with your diligence?'
'Not for a moment, first captain,' Loken replied. There was a strict hierarchy of respect within the Legion, and though he was a senior officer, Loken regarded the peerless first captain with awe. All of the Mournival, in fact, though Torgaddon had always favoured Loken with genuine shows of friendship.
Now Sejanus was gone, Loken thought. The aspect of the Mournival would soon change.
'I'm playing with you, Loken.' Abaddon sent, his voice so deep that some vowel sounds were blurred by the vox. Til meet you at the feet of this false Emperor. First one there gets to illuminate him.'
Loken fought back a smile. Ezekyle Abaddon had seldom sported with him before. He felt blessed, elevated. To be a chosen man was enough, but to be in with the favoured elite, that was every captain's dream.
Reloading, Loken entered the palace through the induction gate, stepping over the tangled corpses of the enemy dead. The plaster facings of the inner walls had been cracked and blown down, and loose crumbs, like dry sand, crunched under his feet. The air was full of smoke, and his visor display kept jumping from one register to another as it attempted to compensate and get a clean reading.
He moved down the inner hall, hearing the echo of gunfire from deeper in the palace compound. The body of a brother lay slumped in a doorway to his left, the large, white-armoured corpse odd and out of place amongst the smaller enemy bodies. Marjex, one of the Legion's apothecaries, was bending over him. He glanced up as Loken approached, and shook his head.
Who is it?' Loken asked.
'Tibor, of Second Squad.' Marjex replied. Loken frowned as he saw the devastating head wound that had stopped Tibor.
The Emperor knows his name.' Loken said.
Marjex nodded, and reached into his narthecium to get the reductor tool. He was about to remove Tibor's precious gene-seed, so that it might be returned to the Legion banks.
Loken left the apothecary to his work, and pushed on down the hall. In a wide colonnade ahead, the towering walls were decorated with frescoes, showing familiar scenes of a haloed Emperor upon a golden throne. How blind these people are, Loken thought, how sad this is. One day, one single day with the iterators, and they would understand. We are not the enemy. We are the same, and we bring with us a glorious message of redemption. Old Night is done. Man walks the stars again, and the might of the Astartes walks at his side to keep him safe.
In a broad, sloping tunnel of etched silver, Loken caught up with elements of Third Squad. Of all the units in his company, Third Squad - Locasta Tactical Squad - was his favourite and his favoured. Its commander, Brother-sergeant Nero Vipus, was his oldest and truest friend.
'How's your humour, captain?' Vipus asked. His pearl-white plate was smudged with soot and streaked with blood.
'Phlegmatic, Nero. You?'
'Choleric. Red-raged, in fact. I've just lost a man, and two more of mine are injured. There's something covering the junction ahead. Something heavy. Rate of fire like you wouldn't |
the units in his company, Third Squad - Locasta Tactical Squad - was his favourite and his favoured. Its commander, Brother-sergeant Nero Vipus, was his oldest and truest friend.
'How's your humour, captain?' Vipus asked. His pearl-white plate was smudged with soot and streaked with blood.
'Phlegmatic, Nero. You?'
'Choleric. Red-raged, in fact. I've just lost a man, and two more of mine are injured. There's something covering the junction ahead. Something heavy. Rate of fire like you wouldn't believe.'
Tried fragging it?'
Two or three grenades. No effect. And there's nothing to see. Garvi, we've all heard about these so-called Invisibles. The ones that butchered Sejanus. I was wondering-'
'Leave the wondering to me,' Loken said. Who's down?'
Vipus shrugged. He was a little taller than Loken, and his shrug made the heavy ribbing and plates of his armour clunk together. 'Zakias.'
'Zakias? No...'
Torn into shreds before my very eyes. Oh, I feel the hand of the ship on me, Garvi.'
The hand of the ship. An old saying. The commander's flagship was called the Vengeful Spirit, and in times of duress or loss, the Wolves liked to draw upon all that implied as a charm, a totem of retribution.
'In Zakias's name,' Vipus growled, 'I'll find this bastard Invisible and-'
'Sooth your choler, brother. I've no use for it,' Loken said. 'See to your wounded while I take a look.'
Vipus nodded and redirected his men. Loken pushed up past them to the disputed junction.
It was a vault-roofed crossways where four hallways met. The area read cold and still to his imaging. Fading smoke wisped up into the rafters. The ouslite floor had been chewed and peppered with thousands of impact craters. Brother Zakias, his body as yet unretrieved, lay in pieces at the centre of the crossway, a steaming pile of shattered white plasteel and bloody meat.
Vipus had been right. There was no sign of an enemy present. No heat-trace, not even a flicker of movement. But studying the area, Loken saw a heap of empty shell cases, glittering brass, that had spilled out from behind a bulkhead across from him. Was that where the killer was hiding?
Loken bent down and picked up a chunk of fallen plasterwork. He lobbed it into the open. There was a click, and then a hammering deluge of autofire raked across the junction. It lasted five seconds, and in that time over a thousand rounds were expended. Loken saw the fuming shell cases spitting out from behind the bulkhead as they were ejected.
The firing stopped. Fycelene vapour fogged the junction. The gunfire had scored a mottled gouge across the stone floor, pummelling Zakias's corpse in the process. Spots of blood and scraps of tissue had been spattered out.
Loken waited. He heard a whine and the metallic clunk of an autoloader system. He read weapon heat, fading, but no body warmth.
Won a medal yet?' Vipus asked, approaching.
'It's just an automatic sentry gun.' Loken replied.
'Well, that's a small relief at least.' Vipus said. 'After the grenades we've pitched in that direction, I was beginning to wonder if these vaunted Invisibles might be "Invulnerables" too. I'll call up Devastator support to-'
'Just give me a light flare.' Loken said.
Vipus stripped one off his leg plate and handed it to his captain. Loken ignited it with a twist of his hand, and threw it down the hallway opposite. It bounced, fizzling, glaring white hot, past the hidden killer.
There was a grind of servos. The implacable gunfire began to roar down the corridor at the flare, kicking it and bouncing it, ripping into the floor.
'Garvi-' Vipus began.
Loken was running. He crossed the junction, thumped his back against the bulkhead. The gun was still blazing. He wheeled round the bulkhead and saw the sentry gun, built into an alcove. A squat machine, set on four pad feet and heavily plated, it had turned its short, fat, pumping cannons away from him to fire on the distant, flickering flare.
Loken reached over and tore out a handful of its servo flexes. The guns stuttered and died.
'We're dear!' Loken called out. Locasta moved up.
That's generally called showing off.' Vipus remarked.
Loken led Locasta up the corridor, and they entered a fine state apartment. Other apartment chambers, similarly regal, beckoned beyond. It was oddly still and quiet.
'Which way now?' Vipus asked.
'We go find this "Emperor".' Loken said.
Vipus snorted. 'Just like that?'
The first captain bet me I couldn't reach him first.'
The first captain, eh? Since when was Garviel Loken on pally terms with him?'
'Since Tenth breached the palace ahead of First. Don't worry, Nero, I'll remember you little people when I'm famous.'
Nero Vipus laughed, the sound snuffling out of his helmet mask like the cough of a consumptive bull.
What happened next didn't make either of them laugh at all.
TWO
Meeting the Invisibles
At the foot of a Golden Throne
Lupercal
'CAPTAIN LOKEN?' He looked up from his work. That's me.' 'Forgive me for interrupting.' she said. You're busy.' Loken set aside the segment of armour he had been polishing and rose to his feet. He was almost a metre taller than her, and naked but for a loin cloth. She sighed inwardly at the splendour of his physique. The knotted muscles, the old ridge-scars. He was handsome too, this one, fair hair almost silver, cut short, his pale skin slightly freckled, his eyes grey like rain. What a waste, she thought.
Though there was no disguising his inhumanity, especially in this bared form. Apart from the sheer mass of him, mere was the overgrown gigantism of the face, that particular characteristic of the Astartes, almost equine, plus the hard, taut shell of his rib-less torso, like stretched canvas.
'I don't know who you are.' he said, dropping a nub of polishing fibre into a litde pot, and wiping his fingers.
She held out her hand. 'Mersadie Oliton, official remembrancer.' she said. He looked at her tiny hand and then shook it, making it seem even more tiny in comparison with his own giant fist.
'I'm sorry.' she said, laughing, 'I keep forgetting you don't do that out here. Shaking hands, I mean. Such a parochial, Terran custom.'
'I don't mind it. Have you come from Terra?'
'I left there a year ago.'despatched to the crusade by permit of the Council.'
You're a remembrancer?'
"You know what that means?'
'I'm not stupid.' Loken said.
'Of course not.' she said, hurriedly. 'I meant no offence.'
'None taken.' He eyed her. Small and frail, though possibly beautiful. Loken had very little experience of women. Perhaps they were all frail and beautiful. He knew enough to know that few were as black as her. Her skin was like burnished coal. He wondered if it were some kind of dye.
He wondered too about her skull. Her head was bald, but not shaved. It seemed polished and smooth as if it had never known hair. The cranium was enhanced somehow, extending back in a streamlined sweep that formed a broad ovoid behind her nape. It was like she had been crowned, as if her simple humanity had been made more regal.
'How can I help you?' he asked.
'I understand you have a story, a particularly entertaining one. I'd like to remember it, for posterity.'
'Which story?'
'Horus killing the Emperor.'
He stiffened. He didn't like it when non-Astartes humans called the Warmaster by his true name.
That happened months ago.' he said dismissively. 'I'm sure I won't remember the details particularly well.'
'Actually.' she said, 'I have it on good authority you can be persuaded to tell the tale quite expertly. I've been told it's very popular amongst your battle-brothers.'
Loken frowned. Annoyingly, the woman was correct. Since the taking of the High City, he'd been required -forced would not be too strong a word - to retell his first-hand account of the events in the palace tower on dozens of occasions. He presumed it was because of Sejanus's death. The Luna Wolves needed catharsis. They needed to hear how Sejanus had been so singularly avenged.
'Someone put you up to this, Mistress Oliton?' he asked.
She shrugged. 'Captain Torgaddon, actually.'
Loken nodded. It was usually him. What do you want to know?'
'I understand the general situation, for I have heard it from others, but I'd love to have your personal observations. What was it like? When you got inside the palace itself, what did you find?'
Loken sighed, and looked round at the rack where his power armour was displayed. He'd only just started cleaning it. His private arming chamber was a small, shadowy vault adjoining the off-limits embarkation deck, the metal walls lacquered pale green. A cluster of glow-globes lit the room, and an Imperial eagle had been stencilled on one wall plate, beneath which copies of Loken's various oaths of moment had been pinned. The close air smelled of oils and lapping powder. It was a tranquil, introspective place, and she had invaded that tranquility.
Becoming aware of her trespass, she suggested, 'I could come back later, at a better time.'
'No, now's fine.' He sat back down on the metal stool where he had been perching when she'd entered. 'Let me see... When we got inside the palace, what we found was the Invisibles.'
'Why were they called that?' she asked. 'Because we couldn't see them.' he replied.
THE INVISIBLES WERE waiting for them, and they well deserved their sobriquet.
Just ten paces into the splendid apartments, the first brother died. There was an odd, hard bang, so hard it was painful to feel and hear, and Brother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The white plasteel.'ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had actually deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive vibration of air, obliterated an ornamental table beside Nero Vipus. A third bang dropped Brother Muriad, his left leg shattered and snapped off like a reed stalk.
The science adepts |
rother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The white plasteel.'ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had actually deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive vibration of air, obliterated an ornamental table beside Nero Vipus. A third bang dropped Brother Muriad, his left leg shattered and snapped off like a reed stalk.
The science adepts of the false Imperium had mastered and harnessed some rare and wonderful form of field technology, and armed their elite guard with it. They cloaked their bodies with a passive application, twisting light to render themselves invisible. And they were able to project it in a merciless, active form that struck with mutilating force.
Despite the fact that they had been advancing combat-ready and wary, Loken and the others were taken completely off guard. The Invisibles were even hidden to their visor arrays. Several had simply been standing in the chamber, waiting to strike.
Loken began to fire, and Vipus's men did likewise. Raking the area ahead of him, splintering furniture, Loken hit something. He saw pink mist kiss the air, and something fell down with enough force to overturn a chair. Vipus scored a hit too, but not before Brother Tar-regus had been struck with such power that his head was punched clean off his shoulders.
The cloak technology evidendy hid its users best if mey remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast, almost black and white, and saw them better: hard oudines against the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses. Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in mandes of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory squad at a mere nod from their master.
Nero Vipus was raging, offended by the cost to his squad. The hand of the ship was truly upon him.
He led the way, cutting a path into a towering room beyond the scene of the ambush. His fury gave Locasta the opening it needed, but it cost him his right hand, crushed by an Invisible's blast. Loken felt choler too. Like Nero, the men of Locasta were his friends. Rituals of mourning awaited him. Even in the darkness of Ullanor, victory had not been so dearly bought.
Charging past Vipus, who was down on his knees, groaning in pain as he tried to pluck the mangled gauntlet off his rained hand, Loken entered a side chamber, shooting at the air blemishes that attempted to block him. A jolt of force tore his bolter from his hands, so he reached over his hip and drew his chainsword from its scabbard. It whined as it kicked into life. He hacked at the faint outlines jostling around him and felt the toothed blade meet resistance. There was a shrill scream. Gore drizzled out of nowhere and plastered the chamber walls and the front of Loken's suit.
'Lupercal!' he grunted, and put the full force of both arms behind his strokes. Servos and mimetic polymers, layered between his skin and his suit's outer plating to form the musculature of his power armour, bunched and flexed. He landed a trio of two-handed blows. More blood showered into view. There was a warbled shriek as loops of pink, wet viscera suddenly became visible. A moment later, the field screening the soldier flickered and failed, and revealed his disembowelled form, stumbling away down the length of the chamber, trying to hold his guts in with both hands.
Invisible force stabbed at Loken again, scrunching the edge of his left shoulder guard and almost knocking him off his feet. He rounded and swung the chainsword. The blade struck something, and shards of metal flew out. The shape of a human figure, just out of joint with the space it occupied, as if it had been cut out of the air and nudged slightly to the left, suddenly filled in. One of the Invisibles, his charged field sparking and crackling around him as it died, became visible and swung his long, bladed lance at Loken.
The blade rebounded off Loken's helm. Loken struck low with his chainsword, ripping the lance out of the Invisible's silver gauntlets and buckling its haft. At the same time, Loken lunged, shoulder barging the warrior against the chamber wall so hard that the friable piaster of the ancient frescoes crackled and fell out.
Loken stepped back. Winded, his lungs and ribcage almost crushed flat, the Invisible made a gagging, sucking noise and fell down on his knees, his head lolling forward. Loken sawed his chainsword down and sharply up again in one fluid, practiced mercy stroke, and the Invisible's detached head bounced away.
Loken circled slowly, the humming blade raised ready in his right hand. The chamber floor was slick with blood and black scraps of meat. Shots rang out from nearby rooms. Loken walked across the chamber and retrieved his bolter, hoisting it in his left fist with a clatter.
Two Luna Wolves entered the chamber behind him, and Loken briskly pointed them off into the left-hand colonnade with a gesture of his sword.
'Form up and advance.' he snapped into his link. Voices answered him.
'Nero?'
'I'm behind you, twenty metres.'
'How's the hand?'
'I left it behind. It was getting in the way.'
Loken prowled forward. At the end of the chamber, past the crumpled, leaking body of the Invisible he had disembowelled, sixteen broad marble steps led up to a stone doorway. The splendid stone frame was carved with complex linenfold motifs.
Loken ascended the steps slowly. Mottled washes of light cast spastic flickers through the open doorway. There was a remarkable stillness. Even the din of the fight engulfing the palace all around seemed to recede. Loken could hear the tiny taps made by the blood dripping off his outstretched chainsword onto the steps, a trail of red beads up the white marble.
He stepped through the doorway.
The inner walls of the tower rose up around him. He had evidently stepped through into one of the tallest and most massive of the palace's spires. A hundred metres in diameter, a kilometre tall.
No, more than that. He'd come out on a wide, onyx platform that encircled the tower, one of several ring platforms arranged at intervals up the height of the structure, but there were more below. Peering over, Loken saw as much tower drop away into the depths of the earth as stood proud above him.
He circled slowly, gazing around. Great windows of glass or some other transparent substance glazed the tower from top to bottom between the ring platforms, and through them the light and fury of the war outside flared and flashed. No noise, just the flickering glow, the sudden bursts of radiance.
He followed the platform round until he found a sweep of curved stairs, flush with the tower wall, that led up to the next level. He began to ascend, platform to platform, scanning for any blurs of light that might betray the presence of more Invisibles.
Nothing. No sound, no life, no movement except the shimmer of light from outside the windows as he passed them. Five floors now, six.
Loken suddenly felt foolish. The tower was probably empty. This search and purge should have been left to others while he marshalled Tenth Company's main force.
Except... its ground-level approach had been so furiously protected. He looked up, pushing his sensors hard. A third of a kilometre above him, he fancied he caught a brief sign of movement, a partial heat-lock.
'Nero?'
A pause. 'Captain.'
'Where are you?'
'Base of a tower. Heavy fighting. We-' There was a jumble of noises, the distorted sounds of gunfire and shouting. 'Captain? Are you still there?'
'Report!'
'Heavy resistance. We're locked here! Where are-'
The link broke. Loken hadn't been about to give away his position anyway. There was something in this tower with him. At the very top, something was waiting.
The penultimate deck. From above came a soft creaking and grinding, like the sails of a giant windmill. Loken paused. At this height, through the wide panes of glass, he was afforded a view out across the palace and the High City. A sea of luminous smoke, underlit by widespread firestorms. Some buildings glowed pink, reflecting the light of the inferno. Weapons flashed, and energy beams danced and jumped in the dark. Overhead, the sky was full of fire too, a mirror of the ground. The speartip had visited murderous destruction upon the city of the 'Emperor'.
But had it found the throat?
He mounted the last flight of steps, his grip on the weapons tight.
The uppermost ring platform formed the base of the tower's top section, a vast cupola of crystal-glass petals, ribbed together with steel spars that curved up to form a finial mast at the apex high above. The entire structure creaked and slid, turning slighdy one way then another as it responded phototropically to the blooms of light outside in the night. On one side of the platform, its back to the great windows, sat a golden throne. It was a massive object, a heavy plinth of three golden steps rising to a vast gilt chair with a high back and coiled arm rests.
The throne was empty.
Loken lowered his weapons. He saw that the tower top turned so that the throne was always facing the light. Disappointed, Loken took a step towards the throne, and then halted when he realised he wasn't alone after all.
A solitary figure stood away to his left, hands clasped behind its back, staring out at the spectacle of war.
The figure turned. It was an elderly man, dressed in a floor-length mauve robe. His hair was thin and white, his face thinner still. He sta |
sts.
The throne was empty.
Loken lowered his weapons. He saw that the tower top turned so that the throne was always facing the light. Disappointed, Loken took a step towards the throne, and then halted when he realised he wasn't alone after all.
A solitary figure stood away to his left, hands clasped behind its back, staring out at the spectacle of war.
The figure turned. It was an elderly man, dressed in a floor-length mauve robe. His hair was thin and white, his face thinner still. He stared at Loken with glittering, miserable eyes.
'I defy you,' he said, his accent thick and antique. 'I defy you, invader.'
"Your defiance is noted,' Loken replied, 'but this fight is over. I can see you've been watching its progress from up here. You must know that.'
The Imperium of Man will triumph over all its enemies.' the man replied.
'Yes.' said Loken. 'Absolutely, it will. You have my promise.'
The man faltered, as if he did not quite understand.
'Am I addressing the so-called "Emperor"?' Loken asked. He had switched off and sheathed his sword, but he kept his bolter up to cover the robed figure.
'So-called?' the man echoed. 'So-called? You cheerfully blaspheme in this royal place. The Emperor is the Emperor Undisputed, saviour and protector of the race of man. You are some imposter, some evil daemon-'
'I am a man like you.'
The other scoffed. You are an imposter. Made like a giant, malformed and ugly. No man would wage war upon his fellow man like this.' He gestured disparagingly at the scene outside.
'Your hostility started this.' Loken said calmly, You would not listen to us or believe us. You murdered our ambassadors. You brought mis upon yourself. We are charged with the reunification of mankind, throughout the stars, in the name of the Emperor. We seek to establish compliance amongst all the fragmentary and disparate strands. Most greet us like the lost brothers we are. You resisted.'
You came to us with lies!'
"We came with the truth.'
Your truth is obscenity!'
'Sir, the truth itself is amoral. It saddens me that we believe the same words, the very same ones, but value them so differently. That difference has led directly to this bloodshed.'
The elderly man sagged, deflated. You could have left us alone.'
'What?' Loken asked.
'If our philosophies are so much at odds, you could have passed us by and left us to our lives, unviolated. Yet you did not. Why? Why did you insist on bringing us to ruin? Are we such a threat to you?'
'Because the truth-' Loken began.
'-is amoral. So you said, but in serving your fine truth, invader, you make yourself immoral.'
Loken was surprised to find he didn't know quite how to answer. He took a step forward and said, 'I request you surrender to me, sir.'
You are the commander, I take it?' the elderly man asked.
'I command Tenth Company.'
You are not the overall commander, then? I assumed you were, as you entered this place ahead of your troops. I was waiting for the overall commander. I will submit to him, and to him alone.'
The terms of your surrender are not negotiable.'
Will you not even do that for me? Will you not even do me that honour? I would stay here, until your lord and master comes in person to accept my submission. Fetch him.'
Before Loken could reply, a dull wail echoed up into the tower top, gradually increasing in volume. The elderly man took a step or two backwards, fear upon his face.
The black figures rose up out of the tower's depths, ascending slowly, vertically, up through the open centre of the ring platform. Ten Astartes warriors, the blue heat of their whining jump pack burners shimmering the air behind them. Their power armour was black, trimmed with white. Catulan Reaver Squad, First Company's veteran assault pack. First in, last out.
One by one, they came in to land on the edge of the ring platform, deactivating their jump packs.
Kalus Ekaddon, Catulan's captain, glanced sidelong at Loken.
The first captain's compliments, Captain Loken. You beat us to it after all.'
'Where is the first captain?' Loken asked.
'Below, mopping up.' Ekaddon replied. He set his vox to transmit. "This is Ekaddon, Catulan. We have secured the false emperor-'
'No,' said Loken firmly.
Ekaddon looked at him again. His visor lenses were stern and unreflective jet glass set in the black metal of his helmet mask. He bowed slighdy. 'My apologies, captain.' he said, archly. The prisoner and the honour are yours, of course.'
That's not what I meant.' Loken replied. 'This man demands the right to surrender in person to our commander-in-chief.'
Ekaddon snorted, and several of his men laughed. This bastard can demand all he likes, captain.' Ekaddon said, 'but he's going to be cruelly disappointed.'
'We are dismanding an ancient empire, Captain Ekaddon.' Loken said firmly. 'Might we not display some measure of gracious respect in the execution of that act? Or are we just barbarians?'
'He murdered Sejanus!' spat one of Ekaddon's men.
'He did.' Loken agreed. 'So should we just murder him in response? Didn't the Emperor, praise be his name, teach us always to be magnanimous in victory?'
The Emperor, praise be his name, is not wifh us.' Ekaddon replied.
'If he's not with us in spirit, captain.' Loken replied, 'then I pity the future of this crusade.'
Ekaddon stared at Loken for a moment, then ordered his second to transmit a signal to the fleet. Loken was quite sure Ekaddon had not backed down because he'd been convinced by any argument or fine principle. Though Ekaddon, as Captain of First Company's assault elite, had glory and favour on his side, Loken, a company captain, had superiority of rank.
A signal has been sent to the Warmaster.' Loken told the elderly man.
'Is he coming here? Now?' the man asked eagerly
'Arrangements will be made for you to meet him.' Ekaddon snapped.
They waited for a minute or two for a signal response. Astartes attack ships, their engines glowing, streaked past the windows. The light from huge detonations sheeted the southern skies and slowly died away. Loken watched the criss-cross shadows play across the ring platform in the dying light.
He started. He suddenly realised why the elderly man had insisted so furiously that the commander should come in person to this place. He clamped his bolter to his side and began to stride towards the empty throne.
"What are you doing?' the elderly man asked.
'Where is he?' Loken cried. Where is he really? Is he invisible too?'
'Get back!' the elderly man cried out, leaping forward to grapple with Loken.
There was a loud bang. The elderly man's ribcage blew out, spattering blood, tufts of burned silk and shreds of meat in all directions. He swayed, his robes shredded and on fire, and pitched over the edge of the platform.
Limbs limp, his torn garments flapping, he fell away like a stone down the open drop of the palace tower.
Ekaddon lowered his bolt pistol. 'I've never killed an emperor before.' he laughed.
That wasn't the Emperor,' Loken yelled. 'You moron! The Emperor's been here all the time.' He was close to the empty throne now, reaching out a hand to grab at one of the golden armrests. A blemish of light, almost perfect, but not so perfect that shadows behaved correctly around it, recoiled in the seat.
This is a trap. Those four words were the next that Loken was going to utter. He never got the chance.
The golden throne trembled and broadcast a shock-wave of invisible force. It was a power like that which the elite guard had wielded, but a hundred times more potent. It slammed out in all directions, casting Loken and all the Catulan off their feet like corn sheaves in a hurricane. The windows of the tower top shattered outwards in a multicoloured blizzard of glass fragments.
Most of Catulan Reaver Squad simply vanished, blown out of the tower, arms flailing, on the bow-wave of energy. One struck a steel spar on his way out. Back snapped, his body tumbled away into the night like a broken doll. Ekaddon managed to grab hold of another spar as he was launched backwards. He clung on, plas-teel digits sinking into the metal for purchase, legs trailing out behind him horizontally as air and glass and gravitic energy assaulted him.
Loken, too close to the foot of the throne to be caught by the full force of the shockwave, was knocked flat. He slid across the ring platform towards the open fall, his white armour shrieking as it left deep grooves in the onyx surface. He went over the edge, over the sheer drop, but the wall of force carried him on like a leaf across the hole and slammed him hard against the far lip of the ring. He grabbed on, his arms over the lip, his legs dangling, held in place as much by the shock pressure as by the strength of his own, desperate arms.
Almost blacking out from the relentless force, he fought to hold on.
Inchoate light, green and dazzling, sputtered into being on the platform in front of his clawing hands. The teleport flare became too bright to behold, and then died, revealing a god standing on the edge of the platform.
The god was a true giant, as large again to any Astartes warrior as an Astartes was to a normal man. His armour was white gold, like the sunlight at dawn, the work of master artificers. Many symbols covered its surfaces, the chief of which was the motif of a single, staring eye fashioned across the breastplate. Robes of white cloth fluttered out behind the terrible, haloed figure.
Above the breastplate, the face was bare, grimacing, perfect in every dimension and detail, suffused in radiance. So beautiful. So very beautiful.
For a moment, the god stood there, unflinching, beset by the gale of force, but unmoving, facing it down. Then he raised the storm bolter in his right hand and fired into the tumult.
One shot.
The echo of the detonation rolled around the tower. There was a choking scream, half lost in the uproar, and then the uproar itself stilled abruptly.
The wall of force died away. The hurricane faded |
grimacing, perfect in every dimension and detail, suffused in radiance. So beautiful. So very beautiful.
For a moment, the god stood there, unflinching, beset by the gale of force, but unmoving, facing it down. Then he raised the storm bolter in his right hand and fired into the tumult.
One shot.
The echo of the detonation rolled around the tower. There was a choking scream, half lost in the uproar, and then the uproar itself stilled abruptly.
The wall of force died away. The hurricane faded. Splinters of glass tinkled as they rained back down onto the platform.
No longer impelled, Ekaddon crashed back down against the blown-out sill of the window frame. His grip was secure. He clawed his way back inside and got to his feet.
'My lord!' he exclaimed, and dropped to one knee, his head bowed.
With the pressure lapsed, Loken found he could no longer support himself. Hands grappling, he began to slide back over the lip where he had been hanging. He couldn't get any purchase on the gleaming onyx.
He slipped off the edge. A strong hand grabbed him around the wrist and hauled him up onto the platform.
Loken rolled over, shaking. He looked back across the ring at the golden throne. It was a smoking rain, its secret mechanisms exploded from within. Amidst the twisted, ruptured plates and broken workings, a smouldering corpse sat upright, teeth grinning from a blackened skull, charred, skeletal arms still braced along the throne's coiled rests.
'So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers.' rumbled a deep voice.
Loken looked up at the god standing over him. 'Lupercal...' he murmured.
The god smiled. 'Not so formal, please, captain.' whispered Horus.
'MAY I ASK you a question?' Mersadie Oliton said.
Loken had taken a robe down from a wall peg and was putting it on. 'Of course.'
'Could we not have just left them alone?'
'No. Ask a better question.'
Very well. What is he like?'
'What is who like, lady?' he asked.
'Horus.'
'If you have to ask, you've not met him.' he said.
'No, I haven't yet, captain. I've been waiting for an audience. Still, I would like to know what you think of Horus-'
'I think he is Warmaster.' Loken said. His tone was stone hard. 'I think he is the master of the Luna Wolves and the chosen proxy of the Emperor, praise be his name, in all our undertakings. He is the first and foremost of all primarchs. And I think I take offence when a mortal voices his name without respect or title.'
'Oh!' she said. 'I'm sorry, captain, I meant no-'
'I'm sure you didn't, but he is Warmaster Horus. You're a remembrancer. Remember that.'
THREE
Replevin
Amongst the remembrancers
Raised to the four
THREE MONTHS AFTER the battle for the High City, the first of the remembrancers had joined the expedition fleet, brought directly from Terra by mass conveyance. Various chroniclers and recorders had, of course, been accompanying Imperial forces since the commencement of the Great Crusade, two hundred sidereal years earlier. But they had been individuals, mostly volunteers or accidental witnesses, gathered up like road dust on the advancing wheels of the crusader hosts, and the records they had made had been piecemeal and irregular. They had commemorated events by happenstance, sometimes inspired by their own artistic appetites, sometimes encouraged by the patronage of a particular primarch or lord commander, who thought it fit to have his deeds immortalised in verse or text or image or composition.
Returning to Terra after the victory of Ullanor, the Emperor had decided it was time a more formal and authoritative celebration of mankind's reunification be undertaken. The fledgling Council of Terra evidently agreed wholeheartedly, for the bill inaugurating the foundation and sponsorship of the remembrancer order had been countersigned by no less a person than Malcador the Sigilite, First Lord of the Council. Recruited from all levels of Terran society - and from the societies of other key Imperial worlds - simply on the merit of their creative gifts, the remembrancers were quickly accredited and assigned, and despatched to join all the key expedition fleets active in the expanding Imperium.
At that time, according to War Council logs, there were four thousand two hundred and eighty-seven primary expedition fleets engaged upon the business of the crusade, as well as sixty thousand odd secondary deployment groups involved in compliance or occupation endeavours, with a further three hundred and seventy-two primary expeditions in regroup and refit, or resupplying as they awaited new tasking orders. Almost four point three million remembrancers were sent abroad in the first months following the ratification of the bill. 'Arm the bastards.' Primarch Russ had been reported as saying, 'and they might win a few bloody worlds for us in between verses.'
Russ's sour attitude reflected well the demeanor of the martial class. From primarch down to common army soldier, there was a general unease about the Emperor's decision to quit the crusade campaign and retire to the solitude of his palace on Terra. No one had questioned the choice of First Primarch Horus as Warmaster to act in his stead. They simply questioned the need for a proxy at all.
The formation of the Council of Terra had come as more unpleasant news. Since the inception of the Great Crusade, the War Council, formed principally of the Emperor and the primarchs, had been the epicentre of
Imperial authority. Now, this new body supplanted it, taking up the reins of Imperial governance, a body composed of civilians instead of warriors. The War Council, left under Horus's leadership, effectively became relegated to a satellite status, its responsibilities focused on the campaign and the campaign alone.
For no crime of their own, the remembrancers, most of them eager and excited at the prospect of the work ahead, found themselves the focus of that discontent everywhere they went. They were not welcomed, and they found their commission hard to fulfil. Only later, when the eaxectro tributi administrators began to visit expedition fleets, did the discontent find a better, truer target to exercise itself upon.
So, three months after the battle of the High City, the remembrancers arrived to a cold welcome. None of them had known what to expect. Most had never been off-world before. They were virgin and innocent, over-eager and gauche. It didn't take long for them to become hardened and cynical at their reception.
When they arrived, the fleet of the 63rd Expedition still encircled the capital world. The process of replevin had begun, as the Imperial forces sectioned the 'Imperium', dismantled its mechanisms, and bestowed its various properties upon the Imperial commanders chosen to oversee its dispersal.
Aid ships were flocking down from the fleet to the surface, and hosts of the Imperial army had been deployed to effect police actions. Central resistance had collapsed almost overnight following the 'Emperor's' death, but fighting continued to spasm amongst some of the western cities, as well as on three of the other worlds in the system. Lord Commander Varvaras, an honourable, 'old school' veteran, was the commander of the army forces attached to the expedition fleet, and not for the first time he found himself organising an effort to pick up the pieces behind an Astartes speartip. 'A body often twitches as it dies.' he remarked philosophically to the Master of the Fleet. We're just making sure it's dead.'
The Warmaster had agreed to a state funeral for the 'Emperor'. He declared it only right and proper, and sympathetic to the desires of a people they wished to bring to compliance rather than crush wholesale. Voices were raised in objection, particularly as the ceremonial interment of Hastur Sejanus had only just taken place, along with the formal burials of the battle-brothers lost at the High City. Several Legion officers, including Abaddon himself, refused point blank to allow his forces to attend any funeral rites for the killer of Sejanus. The Warmaster understood this, but fortunately there were other Astartes amongst the expedition who could take their place.
Primarch Dorn, escorted by two companies of his Imperial Fists, the VII Legion, had been travelling with the 63rd Expedition for eight months, while Dorn conducted talks with the Warmaster about future War Council policies.
Because the Imperial Fists had taken no part in the annexation of the planet, Rogal Dorn agreed to have his companies stand tribute at the 'Emperor's' funeral. He did this so that the Luna Wolves would not have to tarnish their honour. Gleaming in their yellow plate, the Imperial Fists silently lined the route of the 'Emperor's' cortege as it wound its way through the battered avenues of the High City to the necropolis.
By order of the Warmaster, bending to the will of the chief captains and, most especially, the Mournival, no remembrancers were permitted to attend.
IGNACE KARKASY WANDERED into the retiring room and sniffed at a decanter of wine. He made a face.
'It's fresh opened.' Keeler told him sourly.
'Yes, but local vintage.' Karkasy replied. This petty little empire. No wonder it fell so easily. Any culture founded upon a wine so tragic shouldn't survive long.'
'It lasted five thousand years, through the limits of Old Night.' Keeler said. 'I doubt the quality of its wine influenced its survival.'
Karkasy poured himself a glass, sipped it and frowned. 'All I can say is that Old Night must have seemed much longer here than it actually was.'
Euphrati Keeler shook her head and turned back to her work, cleaning and refitting a hand-held picter unit of very high quality.
'And then there's the matter of sweat.' Karkasy said. He sat down on a lounger and put his feet up, settling the glass on his wide chest. He sipped again, grimacing, and rested his head back. Karkasy was a tall man, generously upholstered in flesh. His garments were expensive and well-tailored t |
that Old Night must have seemed much longer here than it actually was.'
Euphrati Keeler shook her head and turned back to her work, cleaning and refitting a hand-held picter unit of very high quality.
'And then there's the matter of sweat.' Karkasy said. He sat down on a lounger and put his feet up, settling the glass on his wide chest. He sipped again, grimacing, and rested his head back. Karkasy was a tall man, generously upholstered in flesh. His garments were expensive and well-tailored to suit his bulk. His round face was framed by a shock of black hair.
Keeler sighed and looked up from her work. The what?'
The sweat, dear Euphrati, the sweat! I have been observing the Astartes. Very big, aren't they? I mean to say, very big in every measurement by which one might quantify a man.' They're Astartes, Ignace. What did you expect?' 'Not sweat, that's what. Not such a rank, pervasive reek. They are our immortal champions, after all. I expected them to smell rather better. Fragrant, like young gods.' 'Ignace, I have no clue how you got certified.' Karkasy grinned. 'Because of the beauty of my lyric, my dear, because of my mastery of words. Although that might be found wanting here. How may I begin...? 'The Astartes save us from the brink, the brink,
But oh my life how they stink, they stink.'
Karkasy sniggered, pleased with himself. He waited for a response, but Keeler was too occupied with her work.
'Dammit!' Keeler complained, throwing down her delicate tools. 'Servitor? Come here.'
One of the waiting servitors stalked up to her on thin, piston legs. She held out her picter. This mechanism is jammed. Take it for repair. And fetch me my spare units.'
Yes, mistress.' the servitor croaked, taking the device. It plodded away. Keeler poured herself a glass of wine from the decanter and went to lean at the rail. Below, on the sub-deck, most of the expedition's other remembrancers were assembling for luncheon. Three hundred and fifty men and women gathered around formally laid tables, servitors moving amongst them, offering drinks. A gong was sounding.
'Is that lunch already?' Karkasy asked from the lounger.
'Yes.' she said.
'And is it going to be one of the damned iterators hosting again?' he queried.
Yes. Sindermann yet again. The topic is promulgation of the living truth.'
Karkasy settled back and tapped his glass. 'I think I'll take luncheon here.' he said.
'You're a bad man, Ignace.' Keeler laughed. 'But I think I'll join you.'
Keeler sat down on the chaise facing him, and settled back. She was tall, lean-limbed and blonde, her face pale and slender. She wore chunky army boots and fatigue breeches, with a black combat jacket open to show a white vest, like a cadet officer, but the very masculinity of her chosen garb made her feminine beauty all the more apparent.
'I could write a whole epic about you.' Karkasy said, gazing.
Keeler snorted. It had become a daily routine for him to make a pass at her.
'I've told you, I'm not interested in your wretched, pawing approaches.'
'Don't you like men?' he asked, tilting his reclined head on one side.
Why?'
You dress like one.'
'So do you. Do you like men?'
Karkasy made a pained expression and sat back again, fiddling with the glass on his chest. He stared up at the heroic figures painted on the roof of the mezzanine. He had no idea what they were supposed to represent. Some great act of triumph that clearly had involved a great deal of standing on the bodies of the slain with arms thrust into the sky whilst shouting.
'Is this how you expected it to be?' he asked quietly.
'What?'
When you were selected.' he said. When they contacted me, I felt so...'
'So what?'
'So... proud, I suppose. I imagined so much. I thought I would set foot amongst the stars and become a part of mankind's finest moment. I thought I would be uplifted, and thus produce my finest works.'
And you're not?' Keeler asked.
The beloved warriors we've been sent here to glorify couldn't be less helpful if they tried.'
'I've had some success.' Keeler said. 'I was down on the assembly deck earlier, and captured some fine images. I've put in a request to be allowed transit to the surface. I want to see the war-zone first-hand.'
'Good luck. They'll probably deny you. Every request for access I've made has been turned down.'
They're warriors, Ig. They've been warriors for a long time. They resent the likes of us. We're just passengers, along for the ride, univited.'
"Vou got your shots.' he said.
Keeler nodded. They don't seem to mind me.'
That's because you dress like a man.' he smiled.
The hatch slid open and a figure joined them in the quiet mezzanine chamber. Mersadie Oliton went directly to the table where the decanter sat, poured herself a drink, and knocked it back. Then she stood, silently, gazing out at the drifting stars beyond the barge's vast window ports.
'What's up with her now?' Karkasy ventured.
'Sadie?' Keeler asked, getting to her feet and setting her glass down. What happened?'
'Apparendy, I just offended someone.' Oliton said quickly, pouring another drink.
'Offended? Who?' Keeler asked.
'Some haughty Marine bastard called Loken. Bastard!'
'You got time with Loken?' Karkasy asked, sitting up rapidly and swinging his feet to the deck. 'Loken? Tenth Company Captain Loken?'
'Yes.' Oliton said. Why?'
'I've been trying to get near him for a month now.' Karkasy said. 'Of all the captains, they say, he is the most steadfast, and he's to take Sejanus's place, according to the rumour mill. How did you get authorisation?'
'I didn't.' Oliton said. 'I was finally given credentials for a brief interview with Captain Torgaddon, which I counted as no small success in itself, given the days I've spent petitioning to meet him, but I don't think he was in the mood to talk to me. When I went to see him at the appointed time, his equerry turned up instead and told me Torgaddon was busy. Torgaddon had sent the equerry to take me to see Loken. 'Token's got a good story," he said.'
'Was it a good story?' Keeler asked.
Mersadie nodded. 'Best I've heard, but I said something he didn't like, and he turned on me. Made me feel this small.' She gestured with her hand, and then took another swig.
'Did he smell of sweat?' Karkasy asked.
'No. No, not at all. He smelled of oils. Very sweet and clean.'
'Can you get me an introduction?' asked Ignace Karkasy.
HE HEARD FOOTSTEPS, then a voice called his name. 'Garvi?'
Loken looked around from his sword drill and saw, through the bars of the cage, Nero Vipus framed in the doorway of the blade-school. Vipus was dressed in black breeches, boots and a loose vest, and his truncated arm was very evident. The missing hand had been bagged in sterile jelly, and nanotic serums injected to reform the wrist so it would accept an augmetic implant in a week or so. Loken could still see the scars where Vipus had used his chainsword to amputate his own hand.
"What?'
'Someone to see you.' Vipus said.
'If it's another damn remembrancer-' Loken began.
Vipus shook his head. 'It's not. It's Captain Torgaddon.'
Loken lowered his blade and deactivated the practice cage as Vipus drew aside. The target dummies and armature blades went dead around him, and the upper hemisphere of the cage slid into the roof space as the lower hemisphere retracted into the deck beneath the mat. Tarik Torgaddon entered the blade-school chamber, dressed in fatigues and a long coat of silver mail. His features were saturnine, his hair black. He grinned at Vipus as the latter slipped out past him. Torgaddon's grin was full of perfect white teeth.
Thanks, Vipus. How's the hand?'
'Mending, captain. Fit to be rebonded.'
That's good.' said Torgaddon. Wipe your arse with the other one for a while, all right? Carry on.'
Vipus laughed and disappeared.
Torgaddon chuckled at his own quip and climbed the short steps to face Loken in the middle of the canvas mat. He paused at a blade rack outside the opened cage, selected a long-handled axe, and drew it out, hacking the air with it as he advanced.
'Hello, Garviel.' he said. You've heard the rumour, I suppose?'
'I've heard all sorts of rumours, sir.'
'I mean the one about you. Take a guard.'
Loken tossed his practice blade onto the deck and quickly drew a tabar from the nearest rack. It was all-steel, blade and handle both, and the cutting edge of the axe head had a pronounced curve. He raised it in a hunting stance and took up position facing Torgaddon.
Torgaddon feinted, then smote in with two furious chops. Loken deflected Torgaddon's axe-head with the haft of his tabar, and the blade-school rang with chiming echoes. The smile had not left Torgaddon's face.
'So, this rumour...' he continued, circling.
This rumour.' Loken nodded. 'Is it true?'
'No.' said Torgaddon. Then he grinned impishly. 'Of course it bloody is! Or maybe it's not... No, it is.' He laughed loudly at the mischief.
That's funny.' said Loken.
'Oh, belt up and smile.' Torgaddon hissed, and scythed in again, striking at Loken with two very nonstandard cross-swings that Loken had trouble dodging. He was forced to spin his body out of the way and land with his feet wide-braced.
'Interesting work.' Loken said, circling again, his tabar low and loose. 'Are you, may I ask, just making these moves up?'
Torgaddon grinned. Taught to me by the Warmaster himself.' he said, pacing around and allowing the long axe to spin in his fingers. The blade flashed in the glow of the down lighters aimed on the canvas.
He halted suddenly, and aimed the head of the axe at Loken. 'Don't you want this, Garviel? Terra, I put you up for this myself.'
'I'm honoured, sir. I thank you for that.'
'And it was seconded by Ekaddon.'
Loken raised his eyebrows.
'All right, no it wasn't. Ekaddon hates your guts, my friend.'
The feeling is mutual.'
That's the boy.' Torgaddon roared, and lunged at Loken. Loken smashed the hack away, and counter-chopped, forcing Torgaddon to leap |
of the down lighters aimed on the canvas.
He halted suddenly, and aimed the head of the axe at Loken. 'Don't you want this, Garviel? Terra, I put you up for this myself.'
'I'm honoured, sir. I thank you for that.'
'And it was seconded by Ekaddon.'
Loken raised his eyebrows.
'All right, no it wasn't. Ekaddon hates your guts, my friend.'
The feeling is mutual.'
That's the boy.' Torgaddon roared, and lunged at Loken. Loken smashed the hack away, and counter-chopped, forcing Torgaddon to leap back onto the edges of the mat. 'Ekaddon's an arse.' Torgaddon said, 'and he feels cheated you got there first.'
'I only-' Loken began.
Torgaddon raised a finger for silence. 'You got there first.' he said quietly, not joking any more, 'and you saw the truth of it. Ekaddon can go hang, he's just smarting. Abaddon seconded you for this.'
The first captain?'
Torgaddon nodded. 'He was impressed. You beat him to the punch. Glory to Tenth. And the vote was decided by the Warmaster.'
Loken lowered his guard completely. The Warmaster?'
'He wants you in. Told me to tell you that himself. He appreciated your work. He admired your sense of honour. "Tarik," he said to me, "if anyone's going to take Sejanus's place, it should be Loken." That's what he said.'
'Did he?'
'No.'
Loken looked up. Torgaddon was coming at him with his axe high and whirling. Loken ducked, side-stepped, and thumped the butt of his tabar's haft into Torgad-don's side, causing Torgaddon to mis-step and stumble.
Torgaddon exploded in laughter. 'Yes! Yes, he did. Terra, you're too easy, Garvi. Too easy. The look on your face!'
Loken smiled thinly. Torgaddon looked at the axe in his hand, and then tossed it aside, as if suddenly bored with the whole thing. It landed with a clatter in the shadows off the mat.
'So what do you say?' Torgaddon asked. What do I tell them? Are you in?'
'Sir, it would be the finest honour of my life.' Loken said.
Torgaddon nodded and smiled. Yes, it would.' he said, 'and here's your first lesson. You call me Tarik.'
IT WAS SAID that the iterators were selected via a process even more rigorous and scrupulous than the induction mechanisms of the Astartes. 'One man in a thousand might become a Legion warrior.' so the sentiment went, 'but only one in a hundred thousand is fit to be an iterator.'
Loken could believe that. A prospective Astartes had to be sturdy, fit, genetically receptive, and ripe for enhancement. A chassis of meat and bone upon which a warrior could be built.
But to be an iterator, a person had to have certain rare gifts that belied enhancement. Insight, articulacy, political genius, keen intelligence. The latter could be boosted, either digitally or pharmaceutically, of course, and a mind could be tutored in history, ethic-politics and rhetoric. A person could be taught what to think, and how to express that line of thought, but he couldn't be taught how to think.
Loken loved to watch the iterators at work. On occasions, he had delayed the withdrawal of his company so that he could follow their functionaries around conquered cities and watch as they addressed the crowds. It was like watching the sun come out across a field of wheat.
Kyril Sindermann was the finest iterator Loken had ever seen. Sindermann held the post of primary iterator in the 63rd Expedition, and was responsible for the shaping of the message. He had, it was well known, a deep and intimate friendship with the Warmaster, as well as the expedition master and the senior equerries. And his name was known by the Emperor himself.
Sindermann was finishing a briefing in the School of Iterators when Loken strayed into the audience hall, a long vault set deep in the belly of the Vengeful Spirit. Two thousand men and women, each dressed in the simple, beige robes of their office, sat in the banks of tiered seating, rapt by his every word.
To sum up, for I've been speaking far too long.' Sindermann was saying, 'this recent episode allows us to observe genuine blood and sinew beneath the wordy skin of our philosophy. The truth we convey is the truth, because we say it is the truth. Is that enough?'
He shrugged.
'I don't believe so. "My truth is better than your truth" is a school-yard squabble, not the basis of a culture. "I am right, so you are wrong" is a syllogism that collapses as soon as one applies any of a number of fundamental ethical tools. I am right, ergo, you are wrong. We can't construct a constitution on that, and we cannot, should not, will not be persuaded to iterate on its basis. It would make us what?'
He looked out across his audience. A number of hands were raised.
There?'
'Liars.'
Sindermann smiled. His words were being amplified by the array of vox mics set around his podium, and his face magnified by picter onto the hololithic wall behind him. On the wall, his smile was three metres wide.
'I was thinking bullies, or demagogues, Memed, but "liars" is apt. In fact, it cuts deeper than my suggestions. Well done. Liars. That is the one thing we iterators can never allow ourselves to become.'
Sindermann took a sip of water before continuing. Loken, at the back of the hall, sat down in an empty seat. Sindermann was a tall man, tall for a non-Astartes at any rate, proudly upright, spare, his patrician head crowned by fine white hair. His eyebrows were black, like the chevron markings on a Luna Wolf shoulder plate. He had a commanding presence, but it was his voice that really mattered. Pitched deep, rounded, mellow, compassionate, it was the vocal tone that got every iterator candidate selected. A soft, delicious, clean voice that communicated reason and sincerity and trust. It was a voice worth searching through one hundred thousand people to find.
Truth and lies.' Sindermann continued. Truth and lies. I'm on my hobby-horse now, you realise? Your supper will be delayed.'
A ripple of amusement washed across the hall.
'Great actions have shaped our society.' Sindermann said. The greatest of these, physically, has been the Emperor's formal and complete unification of Terra, the outward sequel to which, this Great Crusade, we are now engaged upon. But the greatest, intellectually, has been our casting off of that heavy mantle called religion. Religion damned our species for thousands of years, from the lowest superstition to the highest conclaves of spiritual faith. It drove us to madness, to war, to murder, it hung upon us like a disease, like a shackle ball. I'll tell you what religion was... No, you tell me. You, there?'
'Ignorance, sir.'
Thank you, Khanna. Ignorance. Since the earliest times, our species has striven to understand the workings of the cosmos, and where that understanding has failed, or fallen short, we have filled in the gaps, plastered over the discrepancies, with blind faith. Why does the sun go round the sky? I don't know, so I will attribute it to the efforts of a sun god with a golden chariot. Why do people die? I can't say, but I will choose to believe it is the murky business of a reaper who carries souls to some afterworld.'
His audience laughed. Sindermann got down off his podium and walked to the front steps of the stage, beyond the range of the vox mics. Though he dropped his voice low, its trained pitch, that practiced tool of all iterators, carried his words with perfect clarity, unen-hanced, throughout the chamber.
'Religious faith. Belief in daemons, belief in spirits, belief in an afterlife and all the other trappings of a preternatural existence, simply existed to make us all more comfortable and content in the face of a measureless cosmos. They were sops, bolsters for the soul, crutches for the intellect, prayers and lucky charms to help us through the darkness. But we have witnessed the cosmos now, my friends. We have passed amongst it. We have learned and understood the fabric of reality. We have seen the stars from behind, and found they have no clockwork mechanisms, no golden chariots carrying them abroad. We have realised there is no need for god, or any gods, and by extension no use any longer for daemons or devils or spirits. The greatest thing mankind ever did was to reinvent itself as a secular culture.'
His audience applauded this wholeheartedly. There were a few cheers of approval. Iterators were not simply schooled in the art of public speaking. They were trained in both sides of the business. Seeded amongst a crowd, iterators could whip it into enthusiasm with a few well-timed responses, or equally turn a rabble against the speaker. Iterators often mingled with audiences to bolster the effectiveness of the colleague actually speaking.
Sindermann turned away, as if finished, and then swung back again as the clapping petered out, his voice even softer and even more penetrating. 'But what of faith? Faith has a quality, even when religion has gone. We still need to believe in something, don't we? Here it is. The true purpose of mankind is to bear the torch of truth aloft and shine it, even into the darkest places. To share our forensic, unforgiving, liberating understanding with the dimmest reaches of the cosmos. To emancipate those shackled in ignorance. To free ourselves and others from false gods, and take our place at the apex of sentient life. That... that is what we may pour faith into. That is what we can harness our boundless faith to.'
More cheers and clapping. He wandered back to the podium. He rested his hands on the wooden rails of the lectern. 'These last months, we have quashed an entire culture. Make no mistake... we haven't brought them to heel or rendered them compliant. We have quashed them. Broken their backs. Set them to flame. I know this, because I know the Warmaster unleashed his Astartes in this action. Don't be coy about what they do. They are killers, but sanctioned. I see one now, one noble warrior, seated at the back of the hall.'
Faces turned back to crane at Loken. There was a flutter of applause.
Sindermann started clapping furiously. |
e have quashed an entire culture. Make no mistake... we haven't brought them to heel or rendered them compliant. We have quashed them. Broken their backs. Set them to flame. I know this, because I know the Warmaster unleashed his Astartes in this action. Don't be coy about what they do. They are killers, but sanctioned. I see one now, one noble warrior, seated at the back of the hall.'
Faces turned back to crane at Loken. There was a flutter of applause.
Sindermann started clapping furiously. 'Better than that. He deserves better than that!' A huge, growing peal of clapping rose to the roof of the hall. Loken stood, and took it with an embarrassed bow.
The applause died away. The souls we have lately conquered believed in an Imperium, a rule of man.' Sindermann said as soon as the last flutter had faded. 'Nevertheless, we killed their Emperor and forced them into submission. We burned their cities and scuppered their warships. Is all we have to say in response to their "why?" a feeble "I am right, so you are wrong"?'
He looked down, as if in thought. 'Yet we are. We are right. They are wrong. This simple, clean faith we must undertake to teach them. We are right. They are wrong. Why? Not because we say so. Because we know so! We will not say "I am right and you are wrong" because we have bested them in combat. We must proclaim it because we know it is the responsible truth. We cannot, should not, will not promulgate that idea for any other reason than we know, without hesitation, without doubt, without prejudice, that it is the truth, and upon that truth we bestow our faith. They are wrong. Their culture was constructed upon lies. We have brought them the keen edge of truth and enlightened them. On that basis, and that basis alone, go from here and iterate our message.'
He had to wait, smiling, until the uproar subsided. 'Your supper's getting cold. Dismissed.'
The student iterators began to file slowly out of the hall. Sindermann took another sip of water from the glass set upon his lectern and walked up the steps from the stage to where Loken was seated.
'Did you hear anything you liked?' he asked, sitting down beside Loken and smoothing the skirts of his robes. 'You sound like a showman.' Loken said, 'or a carnival peddler, advertising his wares.'
Sindermann crooked one black, black eyebrow. 'Sometimes, Garviel, that's precisely how I feel.'
Loken frowned. That you don't believe what you're selling?'
'Do you?'
'What am I selling?'
'Faith, through murder. Truth, through combat.'
'It's just combat. It has no meaning other than combat. The meaning has been decided long before I'm instructed to deliver it.'
'So as a warrior, you are without conscience?'
Loken shook his head. 'As a warrior, I am a man of conscience, and that conscience is directed by my faith in the Emperor. My faith in our cause, as you were just describing to the school, but as a weapon, I am without conscience. When activated for war, I set aside my personal considerations, and simply act. The value of my action has already been weighed by the greater conscience of our commander. I kill until I am told to stop, and in that period, I do not question the killing. To do so would be nonsense, and inappropriate. The commander has already made a determination for war, and all he expects of me is to prosecute it to the best of my abilities. A weapon doesn't question who it kills, or why. That isn't the point of weapons.'
Sindermann smiled. 'No it's not, and that's how it should be. I'm curious, though. I didn't think we had a tutorial scheduled for today.'
Beyond their duties as iterators, senior counsellors like Sindermann were expected to conduct programmes of education for the Astartes. This had been ordered by the Warmaster himself. The men of the Legion spent long periods in transit between wars, and the Warmaster insisted they use the time to develop their minds and expand their knowledge. 'Even the mightiest warriors should be schooled in areas beyond warfare.' he had ordained. There will come a time when war is over, and fighting done, and my warriors should prepare themselves for a life of peace. They must know of other things besides martial matters, or else find themselves obsolete.'
There's no tutorial scheduled.' Loken said, 'but I wanted to talk with you, informally.'
'Indeed? What's on your mind?'
'A troubling thing...'
"You have been asked to join the Mournival.' Sindermann said. Loken blinked.
'How did you know? Does everyone know?'
Sindermann grinned. 'Sejanus is gone, bless his bones. The Mournival lacks. Are you surprised they came to you?'
'I am.'
'I'm not. You chase Abaddon and Sedirae with your glories, Loken. The Warmaster has his eye on you. So does Dorn.'
'Primarch Dorn? Are you sure?'
'I have been told he admires your phlegmatic humour, Garviel. That's something, coming from a person like him.'
'I'm flattered.'
You should be. Now what's the problem?'
'Am I fit? Should I agree?'
Sindermann laughed. 'Have faith.' he said.
There's something else.' Loken said.
'Go on.'
'A remembrancer came to me today. Annoyed me deeply, to be truthful, but there was something she said. She said, "could we not have just left them alone?"'
'Who?'
These people. This Emperor.'
'Garviel, you know the answer to that.'
'When I was in the tower, facing that man-'
Sindermann frowned. The one who pretended to be the "Emperor"?'
"Yes. He said much the same thing. Quartes, from his Quantifications, teaches us that the galaxy is a broad space, and that much I have seen. If we encounter a person, a society in this cosmos that disagrees with us, but is sound of itself, what right do we have to destroy it? I mean... could we not just leave them be and ignore them? The galaxy is, after all, such a broad space.'
'What I've always liked about you, Garviel.' Sindermann said, 'is your humanity. This has clearly played on your mind. Why haven't you spoken to me about it before?'
'I thought it would fade,' Loken admitted.
Sindermann rose to his feet, and beckoned Loken to follow him. They walked out of the audience chamber and along one of the great spinal hallways of the flagship, an arch-roofed, buttressed canyon three decks high, like the nave of an ancient cathedral fane elongated to a length of five kilometres. It was gloomy, and the glorious banners of Legions and companies and campaigns, some faded, or damaged by old battles, hung down from the roof at intervals. Tides of personnel stteamed along the hallway, their voices lifting an odd susurration into the vault, and Loken could see other flows of foot traffic in the illuminated galleries above, where the upper decks overlooked the main space.
'The first thing,' Sinderman said as they strolled along, 'is a simple bandage for your worries. You heard me essay this at length to the class and, in a way, you ventured a version of it just a moment ago when you spoke on the subject of conscience. You are a weapon, Garviel, an example of the finest instrument of destruction mankind has ever wrought. There must be no place inside you for doubt or question. You're right. Weapons should not think, they should only allow themselves to be employed, for the decision to use them is not theirs to make. That decision must be made - with great and terrible care, and ethical consideration beyond our capacity to judge - by the primarchs and the commanders. The Warmaster, like the beloved Emperor before him, does not employ you lighdy. Only with a heavy heart and a certain determination does he unleash the Astartes. The Adeptus Astartes is the last resort, and is only ever used that way.'
Loken nodded.
This is what you must remember. Just because the Imperium has the Astartes, and thus the ability to defeat and, if necessary, annihilate any foe, that's not the reason it happens. We have developed the means to annihilate... We have developed warriors like you, Garviel... because it is necessary.'
A necessary evil?'
A necessary instrument. Right does not follow might. Mankind has a great, empirical truth to convey, a message to bring, for the good of all. Sometimes that message falls on unwilling ears. Sometimes that message is spurned and denied, as here. Then, and only then, thank the stars that we own the might to enforce it. We are mighty because we are right, Garviel. We are not right because we are mighty. Vile the hour when that reversal becomes our credo.'
They had turned off the spinal hallway and were walking along a lateral promenade now, towards the archive annex. Servitors waddled past, their upper limbs laden with books and data-slates.
'Whether our truth is right or not, must we always enforce it upon the unwilling? As the woman said, could we not just leave them to their own destinies, unmolested?'
'You are walking along the shores of a lake.' Sindermann said. A boy is drowning. Do you let him drown because he was foolish enough to fall into the water before he had learned to swim? Or do you fish him out, and teach him how to swim?'
Loken shrugged. The latter.'
'What if he fights you off as you attempt to save him, because he is afraid of you? Because he doesn't want to learn how to swim?'
'I save him anyway.'
They had stopped walking. Sindermann pressed his hand to the key plate set into the brass frame of a huge door, and allowed his palm to be read by the scrolling light. The door opened, exhaling like a mouth, gusting out climate-controlled air and a background hint of dust.
They stepped into the vault of Archive Chamber Three. Scholars, sphragists and metaphrasts worked in silence at the reading desks, summoning servitors to select volumes from the sealed stacks.
"What interests me about your concerns.' Sindermann said, keeping his voice precisely low so that only Loken's enhanced hearing could follow it, 'is what they say about you. We have established you are a weapon, and that you don't need to think about what you do because the thinking is done fo |
t of dust.
They stepped into the vault of Archive Chamber Three. Scholars, sphragists and metaphrasts worked in silence at the reading desks, summoning servitors to select volumes from the sealed stacks.
"What interests me about your concerns.' Sindermann said, keeping his voice precisely low so that only Loken's enhanced hearing could follow it, 'is what they say about you. We have established you are a weapon, and that you don't need to think about what you do because the thinking is done for you. Yet you allow the human spark in you to worry, to fret and empathise. You retain the ability to consider the cosmos as a man would, not as an instrument might.'
'I see.' Loken replied. You're saying I have forgotten my place. That I have overstepped the bounds of my function.'
'Oh no.' Sindermann smiled. 'I'm saying you have found your place.'
'How so?' Loken asked.
Sindermann gestured to the stacks of books that rose, like towers, into the misty altitudes of the archive. High above, hovering servitors searched and retrieved ancient texts sealed in plastek carriers, swarming across the cliff-faces of the library like honey bees.
'Regard the books.' Sindermann said.
'Are there some I should read? Will you prepare a list for me?'
'Read them all. Read them again. Swallow the learning and ideas of our predecessors whole, for it can only improve you as a man, but if you do, you'll find that none of them holds an answer to still your doubts.'
Loken laughed, puzzled. Some of the metaphrasts nearby looked up from their study, annoyed at the interruption. They quickly looked down again when they saw the noise had issued from an Astartes.
'What is the Mournival, Garviel?' Sindermann whispered.
You know very well...'
'Humour me. Is it an official body? An organ of governance, formally ratified, a Legio rank?'
'Of course not. It is an informal honour. It has no official weight. Since the earliest era of our Legion there has been a Mournival. Four captains, those regarded by their peers to be...'
He paused.
The best?' Sindermann asked.
'My modesty is ashamed to use that word. The most appropriate. At any time, the Legion, in an unofficial manner quite separate from the chain of command, composes a Mournival. A confratern of four captains, preferably ones of markedly different aspects and humours, who act as the soul of the Legion.'
'And their job is to watch over the moral health of the Legion, isn't that so? To guide and shape its philosophy? And, most important of all, to stand beside the commander and be the voices he listens to before any others. To be the comrades and friends he can turn to privately, and talk out his concerns and troubles with freely, before they ever become matters of state or Council.'
That is what the Mournival is supposed to do.' Loken agreed.
Then it occurs to me, Garviel, that only a weapon which questions its use could be of any value in that role. To be a member of the Mournival, you need to have concerns. You need to have wit, and most certainly you need to have doubts. Do you know what a nay-smith is?'
'No.'
'In early Terran history, during the dominance of the Sumaturan dynasts, naysmiths were employed by the ruling classes. Their job was to disagree. To question everything. To consider any argument or policy and find fault with it, or articulate the counter position. They were highly valued.'
You want me to become a naysmith?' Loken asked.
Sindermann shook his head. 'I want you to be you, Garviel. The Mournival needs your common sense and clarity. Sejanus was always the voice of reason, the measured balance between Abaddon's choler and Aximand's melancholic disdain. The balance is gone, and the Warmaster needs that balance now more than ever. You came to me this morning because you wanted my blessing. You wanted to know if you should accept the honour. By your own admission, Garviel, by the merit of your own doubts, you have answered your own question.'
FOUR
Summoned Ezekyle by name
A winning hand
SHE HAD ASKED what the planet was called, and the crew of the shuttle had answered her 'Terra', which was hardly useful. Mersadie Olitan had spent the first twenty-eight years of her twenty-nine-year life on Terra, and this wasn't it.
The iterator sent to accompany her was of little better use. A modest, olive-skinned man in his late teens, the iterator's name was Memed, and he was possessed of a fearsome intellect and precocious genius. But the violent sub-orbital passage of the shuttle disagreed with his constitution, and he spent most of the trip unable to answer her questions because he was too occupied retching into a plastek bag.
The shuttle set down on a stretch of formal lawn between rows of spayed and pollarded trees, eight kilometres west of the High City. It was early evening, and stars already glimmered in the violet smudge at the sky's edges. At high altitude, ships passed over, their lights blinking. Mersadie stepped down the shuttle's ramp onto the grass, breathing in the odd scents and slightly variant atmosphere of the world.
She stopped short. The air, oxygen rich, she imagined, was making her giddy, and that giddiness was further agitated by the thought of where she was. For the first time in her life she was standing on another soil, another world. It seemed to her quite momentous, as if a ceremonial band ought to be playing. She was, as far as she knew, one of the very first of the remembrancers to be granted access to the surface of the conquered world.
She turned to look at the distant city, taking in the panorama and committing it to her memory coils. She blink-clicked her eyes to store certain views digitally, noting that smoke still rose from the cityscape, though the fight had been over months ago.
We are calling it Sixty-Three Nineteen.' the iterator said, coming down the ramp behind her. Apparently, his queasy constitution had been stabilised by planet-fall. She recoiled delicately from the stink of sick on his breath.
'Sixty-Three Nineteen?' she asked.
'It being the ninteenth world the 63rd Expedition has brought to compliance.' Memed said, 'though, of course, full compliance is not yet established here. The charter is yet to be ratified. Lord Governor Elect Rakris is having trouble forming a consenting coalition parliament, but Sixty-Three Nineteen will do. The locals call this world Terra, and we can't be having two of those, can we? As far as I see it, that was the root of the problem in the first place...'
'I see.' said Mersadie, moving away. She touched her hand against the bark of one of the pollarded trees. It felt... real. She smiled to herself and blink-clicked it. Already, the basis of her account, with visual keys, was formulating in her enhanced mind. A personal angle, that's what she'd take. She'd use the novelty and unfa-miliarity of her first planetfall as a theme around which her remembrance would hang.
'It's a beautiful evening,' the iterator announced, coming to stand beside her. He'd left his sloshing bags of vomit at the foot of the ramp, as if he expected someone to dispose of them for him.
The four army troopers delegated to her protection certainly weren't about to do it. Perspiring in their heavy velvet overcoats and shakos, their rifles slung over their shoulders, they closed up around her.
'Mistress Oliton?' the officer said. 'He's waiting.'
Mersadie nodded and followed them. Her heart was beating hard. This was going to be quite an occasion. A week before, her friend and fellow remembrancer Euphrati Keeler, who had emphatically achieved more than any of the remembrancers so far, had been on hand in the eastern city of Kaentz, observing crusader operations, when Maloghust had been found alive.
The Warmaster's equerry, believed lost when the ships of his embassy had been burned out of orbit, had survived, escaping via drop-pod. Badly injured, he had been nursed and protected by the family of a farmer in the territories outside Kaentz. Keeler had been right there, by chance, to pict record the equerry's recovery from the farmstead. It had been a coup. Her picts, so beautifully composed, had been flashed around the expedition fleet, and savoured by the Imperial retinues. Suddenly, Euphrati Keeler was being talked about. Suddenly, remembrancers weren't such a bad thing after all. With a few, brilliant clicks of her picter, Euphrati had advanced the cause of the remembrancers enormously.
Now Mersadie hoped she could do the same. She had been summoned. She still couldn't quite get over that. She had been summoned to the surface. That fact alone would have been enough, but it was who had summoned her that really mattered. He had personally authorised her transit permit, and seen to the appointment of a bodyguard and one of Sindermann's best iterators.
She couldn't understand why. Last time they'd met, he'd been so brutal that she'd considered resigning and taking the first conveyance home.
He was standing on a gravel pathway between the tree rows, waiting for her. As she came up, the soldiers around her, she registered simple awe at the sight of him in his full plate. Gleaming white, with a trace of black around the edges. His helm, with its lateral horse-brush crest, was off, hung at his waist. He was a giant, two and a half metres tall.
She sensed the soldiers around her hesitating.
'Wait here.' she told them, and they dropped back, relieved. A soldier of the Imperial army could be as tough as old boots, but he didn't want to tangle with an Astartes. Especially not one of the Luna Wolves, the mightiest of the mighty, the deadliest of all Legions.
'You too.' she said to the iterator.
'Oh, right.' Memed said, coming to a halt.
The summons was personal.'
'I understand.' he said.
Mersadie walked up to the Luna Wolves captain. He towered over her, so much she had to shield her eyes with her hand against the setting sun to look up at him.
'Remembrancer.' he said, his voice as deep as an oak-root.
'Capta |
dn't want to tangle with an Astartes. Especially not one of the Luna Wolves, the mightiest of the mighty, the deadliest of all Legions.
'You too.' she said to the iterator.
'Oh, right.' Memed said, coming to a halt.
The summons was personal.'
'I understand.' he said.
Mersadie walked up to the Luna Wolves captain. He towered over her, so much she had to shield her eyes with her hand against the setting sun to look up at him.
'Remembrancer.' he said, his voice as deep as an oak-root.
'Captain. Before we start, I'd like to apologise for any offence I may have caused the last time we-'
'If I'd taken offence, mistress, would I have summoned you here?'
'I suppose not.'
"You suppose right. You raised my hackles with your questions last time, but I admit I was too hard on you.'
'I spoke with unnecessary temerity-'
'It was that temerity that caused me to think of you.' Loken replied. 'I can't explain further. I won't, but you should know that it was your very speaking out of turn that brought me here. Which is why I decided to have you brought here too. If that's what remembrancers do, you've done your job well.'
Mersadie wasn't sure what to say. She lowered her hand. The last rays of sunlight were in her eyes. 'Do you... do you want me to witness something? To remember something?'
'No.' he replied curtly. 'What happens now happens privately, but I wanted you to know that, in part, it is because of you. When I return, if I feel it is appropriate, I will convey certain recollections to you. If that is acceptable.'
'I'm honoured, captain. I will await your pleasure.'
Loken nodded.
'Should I come with-' Memed began.
'No.' said the Luna Wolf.
'Right.' Memed said quickly, backing off. He went away to study a tree bole.
You asked me the right questions, and so showed me I was asking the right questions too.' Loken told Mersadie.
'Did I? Did you answer them?'
'No.' he replied. Wait here, please.' he said, and walked away towards a box hedge trimmed by the finest topiarists into a thick, green bastion wall. He vanished from sight under a leafy arch.
Mersadie turned to the waiting soldiers.
'Know any games?' she asked.
They shrugged.
She plucked a deck of cards from her coat pocket. 'I've got one to show you.' she grinned, and sat down on the grass to deal.
The soldiers put down their rifles and grouped around her in the lengthening blue shadows.
'Soldiers love cards.' Ignace Karkasy had said to her before she left the flagship, right before he'd grinned and handed her the deck.
BEYOND THE HIGH hedge, an ornamental water garden lay in shadowy ruin. The height of the hedge and the neighbouring trees, just now becoming spiky black shapes against the rose sky, screened out what was left of the direct sunlight. The gloom upon the gardens was almost misty.
The garden had once been composed of rectangular ouslite slabs laid like giant flagstones, surrounding a series of square, shallow basins where lilies and bright water flowers had flourished in pebbly sinks fed by some spring or water source. Frail ghost ferns and weeping trees had edged the pools.
During the assault of the High City, shells or airborne munitions had bracketed the area, felling many of the plants and shattering a great number of the blocks. Many of the ouslite slabs had been dislodged, and several of the pools greatly increased in breadth and depth by the addition of deep, gouging craters.
But the hidden spring had continued to feed the place, filling the shell holes, and pouring overflow between dislodged stones.
The whole garden was a shimmering, flat pool in the gloom, out of which tangled branches, broken root balls and asymmetric shards of rock stuck up in miniature archipelagos.
Some of the intact blocks, slabs two metres long and half a metre thick, had been rearranged, and not randomly by the blasts. They had been levered out to form a walkway into the pool area, a stone jetty sunk almost flush with the water's surface.
Loken stepped out onto the causeway and began to follow it. The air smelled damp, and he could hear the clack of amphibians and the hiss of evening flies. Water flowers, their fragile colours almost lost in the closing darkness, drifted on the still water either side of his path.
Loken felt no fear. He was not built to feel it, but he registered a trepidation, an anticipation fliat made his hearts beat. He was, he knew, about to pass a threshold in his life, and he held faith that what lay beyond that threshold would be provident. It also felt right that he was about to take a profound step forward in his career. His world, his life, had changed greatly of late, with the rise of the Warmaster and the consequent alteration of the crusade, and it was only proper that he changed with it. A new phase. A new time.
He paused and looked up at the stars that were beginning to light in the purpling sky. A new time, and a glorious new time at that. Like him, mankind was on a threshold, about to step forward into greatness.
He had gone deep into the ragged sprawl of the water garden, far beyond the lamps of the landing zone behind the hedge, far beyond the lights of the city. The sun had vanished. Blue shadows surrounded him.
The causeway path came to an end. Water gleamed beyond. Ahead, across thirty metres of still pond, a little bank of weeping trees rose up like an atoll, silhouetted against the sky.
He wondered if he should wait. Then he saw a flicker of light amongst the trees across the water, a flutter of yellow flame that went as quickly as it came.
Loken stepped off the causeway into the water. It was shin deep. Ripples, hard black circles, radiated out across the reflective pool. He began to wade out towards the islet, hoping that his feet wouldn't suddenly encounter some unexpected depth of submerged crater and so lend comedy to this solemn moment.
He reached the bank of trees and stood in the shallows, gazing up into the tangled blackness.
'Give us your name.' a voice called out of the darkness. It spoke the words in Cthonic, his home-tongue, the battle-argot of the Luna Wolves.
'Garviel Loken is my name to give.'
'And what is your honour?'
'I am Captain of the Tenth Company of the Sixteenth Legio Astartes.'
'And who is your sworn master?'
The Warmaster and the Emperor both.'
Silence followed, interrupted only by the splash of frogs and the noise of insects in the waterlogged thickets.
The voice spoke again. Two words. 'Illuminate him.'
There was a brief metallic scrape as the slot of a lantern was pulled open, and yellow flame-light shone out across him. Three figures stood on the tree-lined bank above him, one holding the lantern up.
Aximand. Torgaddon, lifting the lantern. Abaddon.
Like him, they wore their warrior armour, the dancing light catching bright off the curves of the plate. All were bareheaded, their crested helmets hung at their waists.
'Do you vouch that this soul is all he claims to be?' Abaddon asked. It seemed a strange question, as all three of them knew him well enough. Loken understood it was part of the ceremony.
'I so vouch.' Torgaddon said. 'Increase the light.'
Abaddon and Aximand stepped away, and began to open the slots of a dozen other lanterns hanging from the surrounding boughs. When they had finished, a golden light suffused them all. Torgaddon set his own lamp on the ground.
The trio stepped forward into the water to face Loken. Tarik Torgaddon was the tallest of them, his trickster grin never leaving his face. 'Loosen up, Garvi.' he chuckled. 'We don't bite.'
Loken flashed a smile back, but he felt unnerved. Partly, it was the high status of these three men, but he also hadn't expected the induction to be so ritualistic.
Horus Aximand, Captain of Fifth Company, was the youngest and shortest of them, shorter than Loken. He was squat and robust, like a guard dog. His head was shaved smooth, and oiled, so that the lamp-light gleamed off it. Aximand, like many in the younger generations of the Legion, had been named in honour of the commander, but only he used the name openly. His noble face, with wide-set eyes and firm, straight nose, uncannily resembled the visage of the Warmaster, and this had earned him the affectionate name 'Little Horus'. Littie Horus Aximand, the devil-dog in war, the master strategist. He nodded greeting to Loken.
Ezekyle Abaddon, first captain of the Legion, was a towering brute. Somewhere between Loken's height and Torgaddon's, he seemed greater than both due to the cresting top-knot adorning his otherwise shaved scalp. When his helm was off, Abaddon bound his mane of black hair up in a silver sleeve that made it stand proud like a palm tree or a fetish switch on his crown. He, like Torgaddon, had been in the Mournival from its inception. He, like Torgaddon and Aximand both, shared the same aspect of straight nose and wide-spaced eyes so reminiscent of the Warmaster, though only in Aximand were the features an actual likeness. They might have been brothers, actual womb brothers, if they had been sired in the old way. As it was, they were brothers in terms of gene-source and martial fraternity.
Now Loken was to be their brother too.
There was a curious incidence in the Luna Wolves Legion of Astartes bearing a facial resemblance to their primarch. This had been put down to conformities in the gene-seed, but still, those who echoed Horus in their features were considered especially lucky, and were known by all the men as 'the Sons of Horus'. It was a mark of honour, and it often seemed the case that 'Sons' rose faster and found better favour than the rest. Certainly, Loken knew for a fact, all the previous members of the Mournival had been 'Sons of Horus'. In this respect, he was unique. Loken owed his looks to an inheritance of the pale, craggy bloodline of Cthonia. He was the first non-'Son' to be elected to this elite inner circle.
Though he knew it couldn't be the case, he felt as if he had achieved this eminence throu |
Horus'. It was a mark of honour, and it often seemed the case that 'Sons' rose faster and found better favour than the rest. Certainly, Loken knew for a fact, all the previous members of the Mournival had been 'Sons of Horus'. In this respect, he was unique. Loken owed his looks to an inheritance of the pale, craggy bloodline of Cthonia. He was the first non-'Son' to be elected to this elite inner circle.
Though he knew it couldn't be the case, he felt as if he had achieved this eminence through simple merit, rather than the atavistic whim of physiognomy.
This is a simple act,' Abaddon said, regarding Loken. "You have been vouched for here, and proposed by great men before that. Our lord, and the Lord Dorn have both put your name forward.' 'As have you, sir, so I understand,' Loken said. Abaddon smiled. 'Few match you in soldiering, Garviel. I've had my eye on you, and you proved my interest when you took the palace ahead of me.'
'Luck.'
There's no such thing.' said Aximand gruffly.
'He only says that because he never has any,' Torgaddon grinned.
'I only say that because there's no such thing,' Aximand objected. 'Science has shown us this. There is no luck. There is only success or the lack of it.'
'Luck,' said Abaddon. 'Isn't that just a word for modesty? Garviel is too modest to say "Yes, Ezekyle, I bested you, I won the palace, and triumphed where you did not," for he feels that would not become him. And I admire modesty in a man, but the truth is, Garviel, you are here because you are a warrior of superlative talent. We welcome you.'
Thank you, sir.' Loken said.
'A first lesson, then.' Abaddon said. 'In the Mournival, we are equals. There is no rank. Before the men, you may refer to me as "sir" or "first captain", but between us, there is no ceremony. I am Ezekyle.'
'Horus.' said Aximand.
Tarik.' said Torgaddon.
'I understand.' Loken answered, 'Ezekyle.'
The rales of our confratern are simple.' Aximand said, 'and we will get to them, but there is no structure to the duties expected of you. You should prepare yourself to spend more time with the command staff, and function at the Warmaster's side. Have you a proxy in mind to oversee the Tenth in your absence?'
Yes, Horus.' Loken said.
Vipus?' Torgaddon smiled.
'I would.' Loken said, 'but the honour should be Jubal's. Seniority and rank.'
Aximand shook his head. 'Second lesson. Go with your heart. If you trust Vipus, make it Vipus. Never compromise. Jubal's a big boy. He'll get over it.'
There will be other duties and obligations, special duties...' Abaddon said. 'Escorts, ceremonies, embassies, planning meetings. Are you sanguine about that? Your life will change.'
'I am sanguine.' Loken nodded.
Then we should mark you in.' Abaddon said. He stepped past Loken and waded forward into the shallow lake, away from the light of the lamps. Aximand followed him. Torgaddon touched Loken on the arm and ushered him along as well.
They strode out into the black water and formed a ring. Abaddon bade them stand stock-still until the water ceased to lap and ripple. It became mirror-smooth. The bright reflection of the rising moon wavered on the water between them.
The one fixture that has always witnessed an induction,' Abaddon said. The moon. Symbolic of our Legion name. No one has ever entered the Mournival, except by die light of a moon.'
Loken nodded.
This seems a poor, false one.' Aximand muttered, looking up at the sky, 'but it will do. The image of the moon must also always be reflected. In the first days of the Mournival, close on two hundred years ago, it was favoured to have the chosen moon's image captured in a scrying dish or polished mirror. We make do now.
Water suffices.'
Loken nodded again. His feeling of being unnerved had returned, sharp and unwelcome. This was a ritual, and it smacked dangerously of the practices of corpse-whisperers and spiritualists. The entire process seemed shot through with superstition and arcane worship, the sort of spiritual unreason Sindermann had taught him to rail against.
He felt he had to say something before it was too late. 'I am a man of faith,' he said softly, 'and that faith is the truth of the Imperium. I will not bow to any fane or acknowledge any spirit. I own only the empirical clarity of Imperial Truth.'
The other three looked at him.
'I told you he was straight up and down.' Torgaddon said.
Abaddon and Aximand laughed.
There are no spirits here, Garviel.' Abaddon said, resting a hand reassuringly against Loken's arm.
"We're not trying to ensorcel you.' Aximand chuckled.
This is just an old habit, a practice. The way it has always been done.' Torgaddon said. "We keep it up for no other reason than it seems to make it matter. It's... pantomime, I suppose.'
'Yes, pantomime.' agreed Abaddon.
We want this moment to be special to you, Garviel.' Aximand said. "We want you to remember it. We believe it's important to mark an induction with a sense of ceremony and occasion, so we use the old ways. Perhaps that's just theatrical of us, but we find it reassuring.'
'I understand.' Loken said.
'Do you?' Abaddon asked. You're going to make a pledge to us. An oath as firm as any oath of moment you have ever undertaken. Man to man. Cold and clear and very, very secular. An oath of brothership, not some occult pact. We stand together in the light of a moon, and swear a bond that only death will break.'
'I understand.' Loken repeated. He felt foolish. 'I want to take the oath.'
Abaddon nodded. 'Let's mark you, then. Say the names of the others.'
Torgaddon bowed his head and recited nine names. Since the foundation of the Mournival, only twelve men had held the unofficial rank, and three of those were present. Loken would be the thirteenth.
'Keyshen. Minos. Berabaddon. Litus. Syrakul. Der-adaeddon. Karaddon. Janipur. Sejanus.'
'Lost in glory.' Aximand and Abaddon said as one voice. 'Mourned by the Mournival. Only in death does duty end.'
A bond that only death will break. Loken thought about Abaddon's words. Death was the single expectation of each and every Astartes. Violent death. It was not an if, it was a when. In the service of the Imperium, each of them would eventually sacrifice his life. They were phlegmatic about it. It would happen, it was that simple. One day, tomorrow, next year. It would happen.
There was an irony, of course. To all intents and purposes, and by every measurement known to the gene-scientists and gerontologists, the Astartes, like the primarchs, were immortals. Age would not wither them, nor bring them down. They would live forever... five thousand years, ten thousand, beyond even that into some unimaginable millennium. Except for the scythe of war.
Immortal, but not invulnerable. Immortality was a by-product of their Astartes strengths. Yes, they might live forever, but they would never get the chance. Immortality was a by-product of their Astartes strengths, but those strengths had been gene-built for combat. They had been born immortal only to die in war. That was the way of it. Brief, bright lives. Like Hastur Sejanus, the warrior Loken was replacing. Only the beloved Emperor, who had left the warring behind, would truly live forever.
Loken tried to imagine the future, but the image would not form. Death would wipe them all from history. Not even the great First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon would survive forever. There would be a time when Abaddon no longer waged bloody war across the territories of humanity.
Loken sighed. That would be a sad day indeed. Men would cry out for Abaddon's return, but he would never come.
He tried to picture the manner of his own death. Fabled, imaginary combats flashed through his mind. He imagined himself at the Emperor's side, fighting some great, last stand against an unknown foe. Primarch Horus would be there, of course. He had to be. It wouldn't be the same without him. Loken would battle, and die, and perhaps even Horus would die, to save the Emperor at the last.
Glory. Glory, like he'd never known. Such an hour would become so ingrained in the minds of men that it would be the cornerstone of all that came after. A great battle, upon which human culture would be based.
Then, briefly, he imagined another death. Alone, far away from his comrades and his Legion, dying from cruel wounds on some nameless rock, his passing as memorable as smoke.
Loken swallowed hard. Either way, his service was to the Emperor, and his service would be true to the end.
The names are said,' Abaddon intoned, 'and of them, we hail Sejanus, latest to fall.'
'Hail, Sejanus!' Torgaddon and Aximand cried.
'Garviel Loken.' Abaddon said, looking at Loken. 'We ask you to take Sejanus's place. How say you?'
'I will do this thing gladly.'
'Will you swear an oath to uphold the confratern of the Mournival?'
'I will.' said Loken.
'Will you accept our brothership and give it back as a brother?'
'I will.'
'Will you be true to the Mournival to the end of your life?'
'I will.'
'Will you serve the Luna Wolves for as long as they bear that proud name?'
'I will.' said Loken.
'Do you pledge to the commander, who is primarch over us all?' asked Aximand.
'I so pledge.'
'And to the Emperor above all primarchs, everlasting?'
'I so pledge.'
'Do you swear to uphold the truth of the Imperium of Mankind, no matter what evil may assail it?' Torgaddon asked.
'I swear.' said Loken.
'Do you swear to stand firm against all enemies, alien and domestic?'
This I swear.'
'And in war, kill for the living and kill for the dead?'
'Kill for the living! Kill for the dead!' Abaddon and Aximand echoed.
1 swear.'
'As the moon lights us.' Abaddon said, 'will you be a true brother to your brother Astartes?'
'I will.'
'No matter the cost?'
'No matter the cost.'
'Your oath is taken, Garviel. Welcome into the Mour-nival. Tarik? Illuminate us.'
Torgaddon pulled a vapour flare from his belt and fired it off into the night sky. It burst in a bright umbrella of light, |
'
'And in war, kill for the living and kill for the dead?'
'Kill for the living! Kill for the dead!' Abaddon and Aximand echoed.
1 swear.'
'As the moon lights us.' Abaddon said, 'will you be a true brother to your brother Astartes?'
'I will.'
'No matter the cost?'
'No matter the cost.'
'Your oath is taken, Garviel. Welcome into the Mour-nival. Tarik? Illuminate us.'
Torgaddon pulled a vapour flare from his belt and fired it off into the night sky. It burst in a bright umbrella of light, white and harsh.
As the sparks of it rained slowly down onto the waters, the four warriors hugged and whooped, clasping hands and slapping backs. Torgaddon, Aximand and Abaddon took turns to embrace Loken.
"You're one of us now,' Torgaddon whispered as he drew Loken close. 'I am.' said Loken.
LATER, ON THE islet, by the light of the lanterns, they branded Loken's helm above the right eye with the crescent mark of the new moon. This was his badge of office. Aximand's helm bore the brand of the half moon, Torgaddon's the gibbous, and Abaddon's the full. The four stage cycle of a moon was shared between their wargear. So the Moumival was denoted.
They sat on the islet, talking and joking, until the sun rose again.
THEY WERE PLAYING cards on the lawn by the light of chemical lanterns. The simple game Mersadie had proposed had long been eclipsed by a punitive betting game suggested by one of the soldiers. Then the iterator, Memed, had joined them, and taken great pains to teach them an old version of cups.
Memed shuffled and dealt the cards with marvellous dexterity. One of the soldiers whistled mockingly. 'A real card hand we have here.' the officer remarked.
This is an old game.' Memed said, 'which I'm sure you will enjoy. It dates back a long way, its origins lost in the very beginnings of Old Night. I have researched it, and I understand it was popular amongst the peoples of Ancient Merica, and also the tribes of the Franc.'
He let them play a few dummy hands until they had the way of it, but Mersadie found it hard to remember what spread won over what. In the seventh turn, believing she had the game's measure at last, she discarded a hand which she believed inferior to the cards Memed was holding.
'No, no.' he smiled. You win.'
'But you have four of a kind again.'
He laid out her cards. 'Even so, you see?'
She shook her head. 'It's all too confusing.'
The suits correspond.' he said, as if beginning a lecture, 'to the layers of society back then. Swords stand for the warrior aristocracy; cups, or chalices, for the ancient priesthood; diamonds, or coins, for the merchant classes; and baton clubs for the worker caste...'
Some of the soldiers grumbled.
'Stop iterating to us.' Mersadie said.
'Sorry.' Memed grinned. 'Anyway, you win. I have four alike, but you have ace, monarch, empress and knave. A mournival.'
'What did you just say?' Mersadie Oliton asked, sitting up.
'Mournival.' Memed replied, reshuffling the old, square-cut cards. 'It's the old Franc word for the four royal cards. A winning hand.'
Behind them, away beyond a high wall of hedge invisible in the still night, a flare suddenly banged off and lit the sky white.
'A winning hand.' Mersadie murmured. Coincidence, and something she privately believed in, called fate, had just opened the future up to her.
It looked very inviting indeed.
FIVE
Peeter Egon Momus
Lecto Divinitatus
Malcontent
PEETER EGON MOMUS was doing them a great honour. Peeter Egon Momus was deigning to share with them his visions for the new High City. Peeter Egon Momus, architect designate for the 63rd Expedition, was unveiling his preparatory ideas for the transformation of the conquered city into a permanent memorial to glory and compliance.
The trouble was, Peeter Egon Momus was just a figure in the distance and largely inaudible. In the gathered audience, in the dusty heat, Ignace Karkasy shifted impatiently and craned his neck to see.
The assembly had been gathered in a city square north of the palace. It was just after midday, and the sun was at its zenith, scorching the bare basalt towers and yards of the city. Though the high walls around the square offered some shade, the air was oven dry and sti-flingly hot. There was a breeze, but even that was heated like exhaust vapour, and it did nothing but stir up fine grit in the air. Powder dust, the particulate residue of the great battle, was everywhere, hazing the bright air like smoke. Karkasy's throat was as arid as a river bed in drought. Around him, people in the crowd coughed and sneezed.
The crowd, five hundred strong, had been carefully vetted. Three-quarters of them were local dignitaries; grandees, nobles, merchants, members of the overthrown government, representatives of that part of Sixty-Three Nineteen's ruling classes who had pledged compliance to the new order. They had been summoned by invitation so that they might participate, however superficially, in the renewal of their society.
The rest were remembrancers. Many of them, like Karkasy, had been granted their first transit permit to the surface, at long last, so they could attend. If this was what he had been waiting for, Karkasy thought, they could keep it. Standing in a crowded kiln while some old fart made incoherent noises in the background.
The crowd seemed to share his mood. They were hot and despondent. Karkasy saw no smiles on the faces of the invited locals, just hard, drawn looks of forbearance. The choice between compliance or death didn't make compliance any more pleasurable. They were defeated, deprived of their culture and their way of life, facing a future determined by alien minds. They were simply, wearily enduring the indignity of this period of transition into the Imperium of Man. From time to time, they clapped in a desultory manner, but only when stirred up by the iterators carefully planted in their midst.
The crowd had drawn up around the aprons of a metal stage erected for the event. Upon it were arranged hololithic screens and relief models of the city to be, as well as many of the extravagantly complex brass and steel surveying instruments Momus utilised in his work. Geared, spoked and meticulous, the instruments suggested to Karkasy's mind devices of torture.
Torture was right.
Momus, when he could be seen between the heads of the crowd, was a small, trim man with over-dainty mannerisms. As he explained his plans, the staff of iterators on stage with him aimed live picters close up at relevant areas of the relief models, the images transferring directly to the screens, along with graphic schematics. But the sunlight was too glaring for decent hololithic projection, and the images were milked-out and hard to comprehend. Something was wrong with the vox mic Momus was using too, and what little of his speech came through served only to demonstrate the man had no gift whatsoever for public speaking.
'...always a heliolithic city, a tribute to the sun above, and we may see this afternoon, indeed, I'm sure you will have noticed, the glory of the light here. A city of light. Light out of darkness is a noble theme, by which, of course, I mean the light of truth shining upon the darkness of ignorance. I am much taken with the local phototropic technologies I have found here, and intend to incorporate them into the design...'
Karkasy sighed. He never thought he would find himself wishing for an iterator, but at least those bastards knew how to speak in public. Peeter Egon Momus should have left the talking to one of the iterators while he aimed the wretched picter wand for them.
His mind wandered. He looked up at the high walls around them, geometric slabs against the blue sky, baked pink in the sunlight, or smoke black where shadows slanted. He saw the scorch marks and dotted bolt craters that pitted the basalt like acne. Beyond the walls, the towers of the palace were in worse repair, their plas-terwork hanging off like shed snakeskin, their missing windows like blinded eyes.
In a yard to the south of the gathering, a Titan of the Mechanicum stood on station, its grim humanoid form rising up over the walls. It stood perfectly still, like a piece of monumental martial statuary, instantly installed. Now that, thought Karkasy, was a far more appropriate celebration of glory and compliance.
Karkasy stared at the Titan for a little while. He'd never seen anything like it before in his life, except in picts. The awesome sight of it almost made the tedious outing worthwhile.
The more he stared at it, the more uncomfortable it made him feel. It was so huge, so threatening, and so very still. He knew it could move. He began to wish it would. He found himself yearning for it to suddenly turn its head or take a step, or otherwise rumble into animation. Its immobility was agonising.
Then he began to fear that if it did suddenly move, he would be quite unmanned, and might be forced to cry out in involuntary terror, and fall to his knees.
A burst of clapping made him jump. Momus had apparently said something apposite, and the iterators were stirring up the crowd in response. Karkasy slapped his sweaty hands together a few times obediendy.
Karkasy was sick of it. He knew he couldn't bear to stand there much longer with the Titan staring at him.
He took one last look at the stage. Momus was rambling on, well into his fiftieth minute. The only other point of interest to the whole affair, as far as Karkasy was concerned, stood at the back of the podium behind Momus. Two giants in yellow plate. Two noble Astartes from the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists, the Emperor's Praetorians. They were presumably in attendance to lend Momus an appropriate air of authority. Karkasy guessed the VII had been chosen over the Luna Wolves because of their noted genius in the arts of fortification and defence. The Imperial Fists were fortress builders, warrior masons who raised such impenettable redoubts that they could be held for eternity against a |
of the podium behind Momus. Two giants in yellow plate. Two noble Astartes from the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists, the Emperor's Praetorians. They were presumably in attendance to lend Momus an appropriate air of authority. Karkasy guessed the VII had been chosen over the Luna Wolves because of their noted genius in the arts of fortification and defence. The Imperial Fists were fortress builders, warrior masons who raised such impenettable redoubts that they could be held for eternity against any enemy. Karkasy smelled the artful handiwork of iterator propaganda: the architects of war watching over the architect of peace.
Karkasy had waited to see if either would speak, or come forward to remark upon Momus's plans, but they did not. They stood there, bolters across their broad chests, as static and unwavering as the Titan.
Karkasy turned away, and began to push his way out through the inflexible crowd. He headed towards the rear of the square.
Troopers of the Imperial army had been stationed around the hem of the crowd as a precaution. They had been required to wear full dress uniform, and they were so overheated that their sweaty cheeks were blanched a sickly green-white.
One of them noticed Karkasy moving out through the thinnest part of the audience, and came over to him.
"Where are you going, sir?' he asked.
'I'm dying of thirst.' Karkasy replied.
There will be refreshments, I'm told, after the presentation,' the soldier said. His voice caught on the word 'refreshments' and Karkasy knew there would be none for the common soldiery.
'Well, I've had enough.' Karkasy said.
'It's not over.'
'I've had enough.'
The soldier frowned. Perspiration beaded at the bridge of his nose, just beneath the rim of his heavy fur shako. His throat and jowls were flushed pink and sheened with sweat.
'I can't allow you to wander away. Movement is supposed to be restricted to approved areas.'
Karkasy grinned wickedly. 'And I thought you were here to keep trouble out, not keep us in.'
The soldier didn't find that funny, or even ironic. "We're here to keep you safe, sir.' he said. 'I'd like to see your permit.'
Karkasy took out his papers. They were an untidy, crumpled bundle, warm and damp from his trouser pocket. Karkasy waited, faintly embarrassed, while the soldier studied them. He had never liked barking up against authority, especially not in front of people, though the back of the crowd didn't seem to be at all interested in the exchange.
'You're a remembrancer?' the soldier asked.
Yes. Poet.' Karkasy added before the inevitable second question got asked.
The soldier looked up from the papers into Karkasy's face, as if searching for some essential characteristic of poet-hood that might be discerned there, comparable to a Navigator's third eye or a slave-drone's serial tattoo. He'd likely never seen a poet before, which was all right, because Karkasy had never seen a Titan before.
You should stay here, sir.' the soldier said, handing the papers back to Karkasy.
'But this is pointless.' Karkasy said. 'I have been sent to make a memorial of these events. I can't get close to anything. I can't even hear properly what that fool's got to say. Can you imagine the wrong-headedness of this? Momus isn't even history. He's just another kind of memorialist. I've been allowed here to remember his remembrance, and I can't even do that properly. I'm so far removed from the things I should be engaging with, I might as well have stayed on Terra and made do with a telescope.'
The soldier shrugged. He'd lost the thread of Karkasy's speech early on. You should stay here, sir. For your own safety.'
'I was told the city had been made safe.' Karkasy said. We're only a day or two from compliance, aren't we?'
The soldier leaned forward discreetly, so close that Karkasy could smell the stale odour of garbage the heat was infusing into his breath. 'Just between us, that's the official line, but there has been trouble. Insurgents. Loyalists. You always get it in a conquered city, no matter how clean the victory. The back streets are not secure.'
'Really?'
They're saying loyalists, but it's just discontent, if you ask me. These bastards have lost it all, and they're not happy about it.'
Karkasy nodded. Thanks for the tip.' he said, and turned back to rejoin the crowd.
Five minutes later, with Momus still droning on and Karkasy close to despair, an elderly noblewoman in the crowd fainted, and there was a small commotion. The soldiers hurried in to take charge of the situation and carry her into the shade.
When the soldier's back was turned, Karkasy took himself off out of the square and into the streets beyond.
HE WALKED FOR a while through empty courts and high-walled streets where shadows pooled like water. The day's heat was still pitiless, but moving around made it more bearable. Periodic breezes gusted down alley ways, but they were not at all relieving. Most were so full of sand and grit that Karkasy had to turn his back to them and close his eyes until they abated.
The streets were vacant, except for an occasional figure hunched in the shadows of a doorway, or half-visible behind broken shutters. He wondered if anybody would respond if he approached them, but felt reluctant to try. The silence was penetrating, and to break it would have felt as improper as disturbing a mourning vigil.
He was alone, properly alone for the first time in over a year, and master of his own actions. It felt tremendously liberating. He could go where he pleased, and quickly began to exercise that privilege, taking street turns at random, walking where his feet took him. For a while, he kept the still-unmoving Titan in sight, as a point of reference, but it was soon eclipsed by towers and high roofs, so he resigned himself to getting lost. Getting lost would be liberating too. There were always the great towers of the palace. He could follow those back to their roots if necessary.
War had ravaged many parts of the city he passed through. Buildings had toppled into white and dusty heaps of slag, or been reduced to their very basements. Others were roofless, or burned out, or wounded in their structures, or simply rendered into facades, their innards blown out, standing like the wooden flats of stage scenery.
Craters and shell holes pock-marked certain pavements, or the surfaces of metalled roads, sometimes forming strange rows and patterns, as if their arrangement was deliberate, or concealed, by some secret code, great truths of life and death. There was a smell in the dry, hot air, like burning or blood or ordure, yet none of those things. A mingled scent, an afterscent. It wasn't burning he could smell, it was things burnt. It wasn't blood, it was dry residue. It wasn't ordure, it was the seeping consequence of sewer systems broken and cracked by the bombardment.
Many streets had stacks of belongings piled up along the pavements. Furniture, bundles of clothing, kitchen-ware. A great deal of it was in disrepair, and had evidently been recovered from ruined dwellings. Other piles seemed more intact, the items carefully packed in trunks and coffers. People were intending to quit the city, he realised. They had piled up their possessions in readiness while they tried to procure transportation, or perhaps the relevant permission from the occupying authorities.
Almost every street and yard bore some slogan or other notice upon its walls. All were hand written, in a great variety of styles and degrees of calligraphic skill. Some were daubed in pitch, others paint or dye, others chalk or charcoal - the latter, Karkasy reasoned, marks made by the employment of burnt sticks and splinters taken from the ruins. Many were indecipherable, or unfathomable. Many were bold, angry graffiti, splenetically cursing the invaders or defiamly announcing a surviving spark of resistance. They called for death, for uprising, for revenge.
Others were lists, carefully recording the names of the citizens who had died in that place, or plaintive requests for news about the missing loved ones listed below. Others were agonised statements of lament, or minutely and delicately transcribed texts of some sacred significance.
Karkasy found himself increasingly captivated by them, by the variation and contrast of them, and the emotions they conveyed. For the first time, the first true and proper time since he'd left Terra, he felt the poet in him respond. This feeling excited him. He had begun to fear that he might have accidentally left his poetry behind on Terra in his hurry to embark, or at least that it malingered, folded and unpacked, in his quarters on the ship, like his least favourite shirt.
He felt the muse return, and it made him smile, despite the heat and the mummification of his throat. It seemed apt, after all, that it should be words that brought words back into his mind.
He took out his chapbook and his pen. He was a man of traditional inclinations, believing that no great lyric could ever be composed on the screen of a data-slate, a point of variance that had almost got him into a fist fight with Palisad Hadray, the other 'poet of note' amongst the remembrancer group. That had been near the start of their conveyance to join the expedition, during one of the informal dinners held to allow the remembrancers to get to know one another. He would have won the fight, if it had come to it. He was fairly sure of that. Even though Hadray was an especially large and fierce woman.
Karkasy favoured notebooks of thick, cream cartridge paper, and at the start of his long, feted career, had sourced a supplier in one of Terra's arctic hives, who specialised in antique methods of paper manufacture. The firm was called Bondsman, and it offered a particularly pleasing quarto chapbook of fifty leaves, bound in a case of soft, black kid, with an elasticated strap to keep it closed. The Bondsman Number 7. Karkasy, a sallow, rawheaded youth back then, had paid a significa |
rce woman.
Karkasy favoured notebooks of thick, cream cartridge paper, and at the start of his long, feted career, had sourced a supplier in one of Terra's arctic hives, who specialised in antique methods of paper manufacture. The firm was called Bondsman, and it offered a particularly pleasing quarto chapbook of fifty leaves, bound in a case of soft, black kid, with an elasticated strap to keep it closed. The Bondsman Number 7. Karkasy, a sallow, rawheaded youth back then, had paid a significant proportion of his first royalty income for an order of two hundred. The volumes had come, packed head to toe, in a waxed box lined with tissue paper, which had smelled, to him at least, of genius and potential. He had used the books sparingly, leaving not one precious page unfilled before starting a new one. As his fame grew, and his earnings soared, he had often thought about ordering another box, but always stopped when he realised he had over half the original shipment still to use up. All his great works had been composed upon the pages of Bondsman Number 7's. His Fanfare to Unity, all eleven of his Imperial Cantos, his Ocean Poems, even the meritorious and much republished Reflections and Odes, written in his thirtieth year, which had secured his reputation and won him the Ethiopic Laureate.
The year before his selection to the role of remembrancer, after what had been, in all fairness, a decade of unproductive doldrums that had seen him living off past glories, he had decided to rejuvenate his muse by placing an order for another box. He had been dismayed to discover that Bondsman had ceased operation.
Ignace Karkasy had nine unused volumes left in his possession. He had brought them all with him on the voyage. But for an idiot scribble or two, their pages were unmarked.
On a blazing, dusty street corner in the broken city, he took the chap-book out of his coat pocket, and slid off the strap. He found his pen - an antique plunger-action fountain, for his traditionalist tastes applied as much to the means of marking as what should be marked - and began to write.
The heat had almost congealed the ink in his nib, but he wrote anyway, copying out such pieces of wall writing as affected him, sometimes attempting to duplicate the manner and form of their delineation.
He recorded one or two at first, as he moved from street to street, and then became more inclusive, and began to mark down almost every slogan he saw. It gave him satisfaction and delight to do this. He could feel, quite definitely, a lyric beginning to form, taking shape from the words he read and recorded. It would be superlative. After years of absence, the muse had flown back into his soul as if it had never been away.
He realised he had lost track of time. Though it was still stifling hot and bright, the hour was late, and the blazing sun had worked its way over, lower in the sky. He had filled almost twenty pages, almost half his chap-book.
He felt a sudden pang. What if he had only nine volumes of genius left in him? What if that box of Bondsman Number 7's, delivered so long ago, represented the creative limits of his career?
He shuddered, chilled despite the clinging heat, and put his chap-book and pen away He was standing on a lonely, war-scabbed street-corner, persecuted by the sun, unable to fathom which direction to turn.
For the first time since escaping Peeter Egon Momus's presentation, Karkasy felt afraid. He felt that eyes were watching him from the blind ruins.
He began to retrace his steps, slouching through gritty shadow and dusty light. Only once or twice did a new graffito persuade him to stop and take out his chap-book again.
He'd been walking for some time, in circles probably, for all the streets had begun to look the same, when he found the eating house. It occupied the ground floor and basement of a large basalt tenement, and bore no sign, but the smell of cooking announced its purpose. Door-shutters had been opened onto the street, and there was a handful of tables set out. For the first time, he saw people in numbers. Locals, in dark sun cloaks and shawls, as unresponsive and indolent as the few souls he had glimpsed in doorways. They were sitting at the tables under a tattered awning, alone or in small, silent groups, drinking thimble glasses of liquor or eating food from finger bowls.
Karkasy remembered the state of his throat, and his belly remembered itself with a groan.
He walked inside, into the shade, nodding politely to the patrons. None responded.
In the cold gloom, he found a wooden bar with a dresser behind it, laden with glassware and spouted bottles. The hostel keeper, an old woman in a khaki wrap, eyed him suspiciously from behind the serving counter.
'Hello.' he said.
She frowned back.
'Do you understand me?' he asked.
She nodded slowly.
That's good, very good. I had been told our languages were largely the same, but that there were some accent and dialect differences.' He trailed off.
The old woman said something that might have been What?' or might have been any number of curses or interrogatives.
'You have food?' he asked. Then he mimed eating.
She continued to stare at him.
'Food?' he asked.
She replied with a flurry of guttural words, none of which he could make out. Either she didn't have food, or was unwilling to serve him, or she didn't have any food for the likes of him.
'Something to drink then?' he asked.
No response.
He mimed drinking, and when that brought nothing, pointed at the bottles behind her.
She turned and took down one of the glass containers, selecting one as if he had indicated it directly instead of generally. It was three-quarters full of a clear, oily fluid that roiled in the gloom. She thumped it onto the counter, and then put a thimble glass beside it.
'Very good.' he smiled. Very, very good. Well done. Is this local? Ah ha! Of course it is, of course it is. A local speciality? You're not going to tell me, are you? Because you have no idea what I'm actually saying, have you?'
She stared blankly at him.
He picked up the bottle and poured a measure into the glass. The liquor flowed as slowly and heavily through the spout as his ink had done from his pen in the street. He put the bottle down and lifted the glass, toasting her.
'To your health.' he said brightly, 'and to the prosperity of your world. I know things are hard now, but trust me, this is all for the best. All for the very best.'
He swigged the drink. It tasted of licorice and went down very well, heating his dry gullet and lighting a buzz in his gut.
'Excellent.' he said, and poured himself a second. Very good indeed. You're not going to answer me, are you? I could ask your name and your lineage and anything at all, and you would just stand there like a statue, wouldn't you? Like a Titan?'
He sank the second glass and poured a third. He felt very good about himself now, better than he had done for hours, better even than when the muse had flown back to him in the streets. In truth, drink had always been a more welcome companion to Ignace Karkasy than any muse, though he would never have been willing to admit it, or to admit the fact that his affection for drink had long weighed down his career, like rocks in a sack. Drink and his muse, both beloved of him, each pulling in opposite directions.
He drank his third glass, and tipped out a fourth. Warmth infused him, a biological warmth much more welcome than the brutal heat of the day. It made him smile. It revealed to him how extraordinary this false Terra was, how complex and intoxicating. He felt love for it, and pity, and tremendous goodwill. This world, this place, this hostelry, would not be forgotten.
Suddenly remembering something else, he apologised to the old woman, who had remained facing him across the counter like a fugued servitor, and reached into his pocket. He had currency - Imperial coin and plastek wafers. He made a pile of them on the stained and glossy bartop.
'Imperial.' he said, 'but you take that. I mean, you're obliged to. I was told that by the iterators this morning. Imperial currency is legal tender now, to replace your local coin. Terra, you don't know what I'm saying, do you? How much do I owe you?'
No answer.
He sipped his fourth drink and pushed the pile of cash towards her. 'You decide, then. You tell me. Take for the whole bottle.' He tapped his finger against the side of the flask. The whole bottle? How much?'
He grinned and nodded at the money. The old woman looked at the heap, reached out a bony hand and picked up a five aquila piece. She studied it for a moment, then spat on it and threw it at Karkasy. The coin bounced off his belly and fell onto the floor.
Karkasy blinked and then laughed. The laughter boomed out of him, hard and joyous, and he was quite unable to keep it in. The old woman stared at him. Her eyes widened ever so slightly.
Karkasy lifted up the bottle and the glass. 'I tell you what,' he said. 'Keep it all. All of it.'
He walked away and found an empty table in the corner of the place. He sat down and poured another drink, looking about him. Some of the silent patrons were staring at him. He nodded back, cheerfully.
They looked so human, he thought, and realised it was a ridiculous thing to think, because they were without a doubt human. But at the same time, they weren't. Their drab clothes, their drab manner, the set of their features, their way of sitting and looking and eating. They seemed a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.
'Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?' he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.
Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branches of mankind? He took another sip. Biologically identical, but for a few strands of genetic inheritance, and yet culturally grown so far apart. These were men who lived and walked |
med a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.
'Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?' he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.
Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branches of mankind? He took another sip. Biologically identical, but for a few strands of genetic inheritance, and yet culturally grown so far apart. These were men who lived and walked and drank and shat, just as he did. They lived in houses and raised cities, and wrote upon walls and even spoke the same language, old women not withstanding. Yet time and division had grown them along alternate paths. Karkasy saw that clearly now. They were a graft from the rootstock, grown under another sun, similar yet alien. Even the way they sat at tables and sipped at drinks.
Karkasy stood up suddenly. The muse had abruptly jostled the pleasure of drink out of the summit of his mind. He bowed to the old woman as he collected up his glass and two thirds empty bottle, and said, 'My thanks, madam.'
Then he teetered back out into the sunlight.
HE FOUND A vacant lot a few streets away that had been levelled to rubble by bombing, and perched himself on a chunk of basalt. Setting down the botde and the glass carefully, he took out his half-filled Bondsman Number 7 and began to write again, forming the first few stanzas of a lyric that owed much to the writings on the walls and the insight he had garnered in the hostelry. It flowed well for a while, and then dried up.
He took another drink, trying to restart his inner voice. Tiny black ant-like insects milled industriously in the rubble around him, as if trying to rebuild their own miniature lost city. He had to brush one off the open page of his chap-book. Others raced exploratively over the toe-caps of his boots in a frenetic expedition.
He stood up, imagining itches, and decided this wasn't a place to sit. He gathered up his bottle and his glass, taking another sip once he'd fished out the ant floating in it with his finger.
A building of considerable size and magnificence faced him across the damaged lot. He wondered what it was. He stumbled over the rubble towards it, almost losing his footing on the loose rocks from time to time.
What was it - a municipal hall, a library, a school? He wandered around it, admiring the fine rise of the walls and the decorated headers of the stonework. Whatever it was, the building was important. Miraculously, it had been spared the destruction visited on its neighbouring lots.
Karkasy found the entrance, a towering arch of stone filled with copper doors. They weren't locked. He pushed his way in.
The interior of the building was so profoundly and refreshingly cool it almost made him gasp. It was a single space, an arched roof raised on massive ouslite pillars, the floor dressed in cold onyx. Under the end windows, some kind of stone structure rose.
Karkasy paused. He put down his botde beside the base of one of the pillars, and advanced down the centre of the building with his glass in his hand. He knew there was a word for a place like this. He searched for it.
Sunlight, filleted by coloured glass, slanted through the thin windows. The stone structure at the end of the chamber was a carved lectern supporting a very massive and very old book.
Karkasy touched the crinkled parchment of the book's open pages with delight. It appealed to him the same way as the pages of a Bondsman Number 7 did. The sheets were old, and faded, covered with ornate black script and hand-coloured images.
This was an altar, he realised. This place, a temple, a fane!
Terra alive!' he declared, and then winced as his words echoed back down the cool vault. History had taught him about fanes and religious belief, but he had never before set foot inside such a place. A place of sprits and divinity. He sensed that the spirits were looking down on his intrusion with disapproval, and then laughed at his own idiocy. There were no spirits. Not anywhere in the cosmos. Imperial Truth had taught him that. The only spirits in this building were the ones in his glass and his belly.
He looked at the pages again. Here was the truth of it, the crucial mark of difference between his breed of man and the local variety. They were heathens. They continued to embrace the superstitions that the fundamental strand of mankind had set aside. Here was the promise of an afterlife, and an ethereal world. Here was the nonsense of a faith in the intangible.
Karkasy knew that there were some, many perhaps, amongst the population of the compliant Imperium, who longed for a return to those ways. God, in every incarnation and pantheon, was long perished, but still men hankered after the ineffable. Despite prosecution, new credos and budding religions were sprouting up amongst the cultures of Unified Man. Most vigorous of all was the Imperial Creed that insisted humanity adopt the Emperor as a divine being. A God-Emperor of Mankind.
The idea was ludicrous and, officially, heretical. The Emperor had always refused such adoration in the most stringent terms, denying his apotheosis. Some said it would only happen after his death, and as he was functionally immortal, that tended to cap the argument. Whatever his powers, whatever his capacity, whatever his magnificence as the finest and most gloriously total leader of the species, he was still just a man. The Emperor liked to remind mankind of this whenever he could. It was an edict that rattled around the bureaucracies of the expanding Imperium. The Emperor is the Emperor, and he is great and everlasting.
But he is not a god, and he refuses any worship offered to him.
Karkasy took a swig and put his empty thimble-glass down, at an angle on the edge of the lectern shelf. The Lectio Divinitatus, that's what it was called. The missal of the underground wellspring that strove, in secret, to establish the Cult of the Emperor, against his will. It was said that even some of the upstanding members of the Council of Terra supported its aims.
The Emperor as god. Karkasy stifled a laugh. Five thousand years of blood, war and fire to expunge all gods from the culture, and now the man who achieved that goal supplants them as a new deity.
'How foolish is mankind?' Karkasy laughed, enjoying the way his words echoed around the empty fane. 'How desperate and flailing? Is it that we simply need a concept of god to fulfill us? Is that part of our make up?'
He fell silent, considering the point he had raised to himself. A good point, well-reasoned. He wondered where his bottle had gone.
It was a good point. Maybe that was mankind's ultimate weakness. Maybe it was one of humanity's basic impulses, the need to believe in another, higher order. Perhaps faith was like a vacuum, sucking up credulity in a frantic effort to fill its own void. Perhaps it was a part of mankind's genetic character to need, to hunger for, a spiritual solace.
'Perhaps we are cursed.' Karkasy told the empty fane, 'to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves.'
The fane seemed oblivious to his ramblings. He took hold of his empty glass and wandered back to where he had left the bottle. Another drink.
He left the fane and threaded his way out into the blinding sunlight. The heat was so intense that he had to take another swig.
Karkasy wobbled down a few streets, away from the temple, and heard a rushing, roasting noise. He discovered a team of Imperial soldiers, stripped to the waist, using a flamer to erase anti-Imperial slogans from a wall. They had evidendy been working their way down the street, for all the walls displayed swathes of heat burns.
'Don't do that.' he said.
The soldiers turned and looked at him, their flamer spitting. From his garments and demeanour, he was unmistakably not a local.
'Don't do that.' he said again.
'Orders, sir.' said one of the troopers.
'What are you doing out here?' asked another.
Karkasy shook his head and left them alone. He trudged through narrow alleys and open courts, sipping from the spout of the bottle.
He found another vacant lot very similar to the one he had sat down in before, and placed his rump upon a scalene block of basalt. He took out his chap-book and ran through the stanzas he had written.
They were terrible.
He groaned as he read them, then became angry and tore the precious pages out. He balled the thick, cream paper up and tossed it away into the rubble.
Karkasy suddenly became aware that eyes were staring at him from the shadows of doorways and windows. He could barely make out their shapes, but knew full well that locals were watching him.
He got up, and quickly retrieved the balls of crumpled paper he had discarded, feeling that he had no right to add in any way to the mess. He began to hurry down the street, as thin boys emerged from hiding to lob stones and jeers after him.
He found himself, unexpectedly, in the street of the hostelry again. It was uninhabited, but he was pleased to have found it as his bottle had become unaccountably empty.
He went into the gloom. There was no one around. Even the old woman had disappeared. His pile of Imperial currency lay where he had left it on the counter.
Seeing it, he felt authorised to help himself to another bottle from behind the bar. Clutching the bottle in his hand, he very carefully sat down at one of the tables and poured another drink.
He had been sitting there for an indefinite amount of time when a voice asked him if he was all right.
Ignace Karkasy blinked and looked up. The gang of Imperial army troops who had been burning clean the walls of the city had entered the hostelry, and the old woman had reappeared to fetch them drinks and food.
The officer looked down at Karkasy as his men took their seats.
'Are you all right, sir?' he asked.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes.' Kar |
y sat down at one of the tables and poured another drink.
He had been sitting there for an indefinite amount of time when a voice asked him if he was all right.
Ignace Karkasy blinked and looked up. The gang of Imperial army troops who had been burning clean the walls of the city had entered the hostelry, and the old woman had reappeared to fetch them drinks and food.
The officer looked down at Karkasy as his men took their seats.
'Are you all right, sir?' he asked.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes.' Karkasy slurred.
You don't look all right, pardon me for saying. Should you be out in the city?'
Karkasy nodded furiously, tucking into his pocket for his permit. It wasn't there. 'I'm meant to be here.' he said, instead. 'Meant to. I was ordered to come. To hear Eater Piton Momus. Shit, no, that's wrong. To hear Peeter Egon Momus present his plans for the new city. That's why I'm here. I'm meant to be.'
The officer regarded him cautiously. 'If you say so, sir. They say Momus has drawn up a wonderful scheme for the reconstruction.'
'Oh yes, quite wonderful.' Karkasy replied, reaching for his bottle and missing. 'Quite bloody wonderful. An eternal memorial to our victory here...'
'Sir?'
'It won't last.' Karkasy said. 'No, no. It won't last. It can't. Nothing lasts. You look like a wise man to me, friend, what do you think?'
'I think you should be on your way, sir.' the officer said gently.
'No, no, no... about the city! The city! It won't last, Terra take Peeter Egon Momus. To the dust, all things return. As far as I can see, this city was pretty wonderful before we came and hobbled it.'
'Sir, I think-'
'No, you don't.' Karkasy said, shaking his head. You don't, and no one does. This city was supposed to last forever, but we broke it and laid it in tatters. Let Momus rebuild it, it will happen again, and again. The work of man is destined to perish. Momus said he plans a city that will celebrate mankind forever. You know what? I bet that's what the architects who built this place diought too.'
'Sir-'
'What man does comes apart, eventually. You mark my words. This city, Momus's city. The Imperium-'
'Sir, you-'
Karkasy rose to his feet, blinking and wagging a finger. 'Don't "sir" me! The Imperium will fall asunder as soon as we construct it! You mark my words! It's as inevitable as-'
Pain abruptly splintered Karkasy's face, and he fell down, bewildered. He registered a frenzy of shouting and movement, then felt boots and fists slamming into him, over and over again. Enraged by his words, the troopers had fallen upon him. Shouting, the officer tried to pull them off.
Bones snapped. Blood spurted from Karkasy's nostrils.
'Mark my words!' he coughed. 'Nothing we build will last forever! You ask these bloody locals!'
A bootcap cracked into his sternum. Bloody fluid washed into his mouth.
'Get off him! Get off him!' the officer was yelling, trying to rein in his provoked and angry men.
By the time he managed to do so, Ignace Karkasy was no longer pontificating.
Or breathing.
SIX
Counsel
A question well answered
Two gods in one room
TORGADDON WAS WAITING for him in the towering ante-hall behind the strategium.
There you are,' he grinned.
'Here I am.' Loken agreed.
There will be a question.' Torgaddon remarked, keeping his voice low. 'It will seem a minor thing, and will not be obviously directed to you but be ready to catch it.'
'Me?'
'No, I was talking to myself. Yes, you, Garviel! Consider it a baptismal test. Come on.'
Loken didn't like the sound of Torgaddon's words, but he appreciated the warning. He followed Torgaddon down the length of the ante-hall. It was a perilously tall, narrow place, with embossed columns of wood set into the walls that soared up and branched like carved trees to support a glass roof two hundred metres above them, through which the stars could be seen. Darkwood panels cased the walls between the columns, and they were covered with millions of lines of hand-painted names and numbers, all rendered in exquisite gilt lettering. They were the names of the dead: all those of the Legions, the army, the fleet and the Divisio Militaris who had fallen since the start of the Great Crusade in actions where this flagship vessel had been present. The names of immortal heroes were limned here on the walls, grouped in columns below header legends that proclaimed the world-sites of famous actions and hallowed conquests. From this display, the ante-hall earned its particular name: the Avenue of Glory and Lament.
The walls of fully two-thirds of the ante-hall were filled up with golden names. As the two striding captains in their glossy white plate drew closer to the strategium end, the wall boards became bare, unoccupied. They passed a group of hooded necrologists huddled by the last, half-filled panel, who were carefully stencilling new names onto the dark wood with gold-dipped brushes.
The latest dead. The roll call from the High City battle.
The necrologists stopped work and bowed their heads as the two captains went by. Torgaddon didn't spare them a second glance, but Loken turned to read the half-writ names. Some of them were brothers from Locasta he would never see again.
He could smell the tangy oil suspension of the gold-leaf the necrologists were using.
'Keep up,' Torgaddon grunted.
High doors, lacquered gold and crimson, stood closed at the end of the Avenue Hall. Before them, Aximand and Abaddon were waiting. They were likewise fully armoured, their heads bare, their brush-crested helms held under their left arms. Abaddon's great white shoulder plates were draped with a black wolf-pelt.
'Garviel,' he smiled.
'It doesn't do to keep him waiting,' Aximand grumbled. Loken wasn't sure if Little Horas meant Abaddon or the commander. 'What were you two gabbing about? Like fish-wives, the pair of you.'
'I was just asking him if he'd settled Vipus in.' Torgaddon said simply.
Aximand glanced at Loken, his wide-set eyes languidly half-hooded by his lids.
'And I was reassuring Tarik that I had.' Loken added. Evidently, Torgaddon's quiet heads-up had been for his ears only.
'Let's enter.' Abaddon said. He raised his gloved hand and pushed the gold and crimson doors wide.
A short processional lay before them, a twenty-metre colonnade of ebon stone chased with a fretwork of silver wire. It was lined by forty Guardsmen of the Imperial army, members of Varvaras's own Byzant Janizars, twenty against each wall. They were splendidly appointed in full dress uniforms: long cream greatcoats with gold frogging, high-crowned chrome helms with basket visors and scarlet cockades, and matching sashes. As the Mournival came through the doors, the Janizars brandished their ornate power lances, beginning with the pair directly inside the doorway. The polished blades of the weapons whirled up into place in series, like chasing dominoes along the processional, each facing pair of weapons locking into position just before the marching captains caught up with the ripple.
The final pair came to salute, eyes-front, in perfect discipline, and the Mournival stepped past them onto the deck of the strategium.
The strategium was a great, semi-circular platform that projected like a lip out above the tiered theatre of the flagship's bridge. Far below lay the principal command level, thronging with hundreds of uniformed personnel and burnished aide servitors, tiny as ants. To either side, the bee-hive sub-decks of the secondary platforms, dressed in gold and black ironwork, rose up, past the level of the projecting strategium, up into the roof itself, each storey busy with Navy staff, operators, cogitation officers and astropaths. The front section of the bridge chamber was a great, strutted window, through which the constellations and the ink of space could be witnessed. The standards of the Luna Wolves and the Imperial Fists hung from the arching roof, either side of the staring eye banner of the Warmaster himself. That great banner was marked, in golden thread, with the decree: 'I am the Emperor's Vigilance and the Eye of Terra.'
Loken remembered the award of that august symbol with pride during the great triumph after Ullanor was done.
In all his decades of service, Loken had only been on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit twice before: once to formally accept his promotion to captain, and then again to mark his elevation to the captaincy of the Tenth. The scale of the place took his breath away, as it had done both times before. .
The strategium deck itself was an ironwork platform which supported, at its centre, a circular dais of plain, unfinished ouslite, one metre deep and ten in diameter. The commander had always eschewed any form of throne or seat. The ironwork walk space around the dais was half-shadowed by the overhang of tiered galleries that climbed the slopes of the chamber behind it. Glancing up, Loken saw huddles of senior iterators, tacticians, ship captains of the expedition fleet and other notables gathering to view the proceedings. He looked for Sindermann, but couldn't find his face.
Several attendant figures stood quiedy around the edges of the dais. Lord Commander Hektor Varvaras, marshal of the expedition's army, a tall, precise aristocrat in red robes, stood discussing the content of a data-slate with two formally uniformed army aides. Boas Comnenus, Master of the Fleet, waited, dramming steel fingers on the edge of the ouslite plinth. He was a squat bear of a man, his ancient, flaccid body encased in a superb silver-and-steel exoskeleton, further draped in robes of deep, rich, selpic blue. Neady machined ocular lenses whirred and exchanged in the augmetic frame that supplanted his long-dead eyes.
Ing Mae Sing, the expedition's Mistress of Astropathy, stood to the master's left, a gaunt, blind spectre in a hooded white gown, and, round from her, in order, the High Senior of the Navis Nobilite, Navigator Chorogus, the Master Companion of Vox, the Master Companion of Lucidatio |
body encased in a superb silver-and-steel exoskeleton, further draped in robes of deep, rich, selpic blue. Neady machined ocular lenses whirred and exchanged in the augmetic frame that supplanted his long-dead eyes.
Ing Mae Sing, the expedition's Mistress of Astropathy, stood to the master's left, a gaunt, blind spectre in a hooded white gown, and, round from her, in order, the High Senior of the Navis Nobilite, Navigator Chorogus, the Master Companion of Vox, the Master Companion of Lucidation, the senior tacticae, the senior heraldists, and various gubernatorial legates.
Each one, Loken noticed, had placed a single personal item on the edge of the dais where they stood: a glove, a cap, a wand-stave.
'We stay in the shadows.' Torgaddon told him, bringing Loken up short under the edge of the shade cast by the balcony above. This is the Mournival's place, apart, yet present.'
Loken nodded, and remained with Torgaddon and Aximand in the symbolic shadow of the overhang. Abaddon stepped forward into the light, and took his place at the edge of the dais between Varvaras, who nodded pleasantly to him, and Comnenus, who didn't. Abaddon placed his helm upon the edge of the ouslite disc.
'An item placed on the dais registers a desire to be heard and noted.' Torgaddon told Loken. 'Ezekyle has a place by dint of his status as first captain. For now, he will speak as first captain, not as the Mournival.'
'Will I get the hang of this ever?' Loken asked.
'No, not at all.' Torgaddon said. Then he grinned. "Yes, you will. Of course, you will!'
Loken noticed another figure, removed from the main assembly. The man, if it were a man, lurked at the rail of the strategium deck, gazing out across the chasm of the bridge. He was a machine, it seemed, much more a machine than a man. Vague relics of flesh and muscle remained in the skeletal fabric of his mechanical body, a fabulously wrought armature of gold and steel.
'Who is that?' Loken whispered.
'Regulus.' Aximand replied curtly. 'Adept of the Mechanicum.'
So that was what a Mechanicum adept looked like, Loken thought. That was the sort of being who could command the invincible Titans into war.
'Hush now.' Torgaddon said, tapping Loken on the arm.
Plated glass doors on the other side of the platform slid open, and laughter boomed out. A huge figure came out onto the strategium, talking and laughing animatedly, along with a diminutive presence who scuttled to keep up.
Everybody dropped in a bow. Loken, going down on one knee, could hear the rustle of others bowing in the steep balconies above him. Boas Comnenus did so slowly, because his exoskeleton was ancient. Adept Regulus did so slowly, not because his machine body was stiff, but rather because he was clearly reluctant.
Warmaster Horus looked around, smiled, and then leapt up onto the dais in a single bound. He stood at the centre of the ouslite disc, and turned slowly.
'My friends.' he said. 'Honour's done. Up you get.'
Slowly, they rose and beheld him.
He was as magnificent as ever, Loken thought. Massive and limber, a demi-god manifest, wrapped in white-gold armour and pelts of fur. His head was bare.
Shaven, sculptural, his face was noble, deeply tanned by multiple sunlights, his wide-spaced eyes bright, his teeth gleaming. He smiled and nodded to each and every one of them.
He had such vitality, like a force of nature - a tornado, a tempest, an avalanche - trapped in humanoid form and distilled, the potential locked in. He rotated slowly on the dais, grinning, nodding to some, pointing out certain friends with a familiar laugh.
The primarch looked at Loken, back in the shadows of the overhang and his smile seemed to broaden for a second.
Loken felt a shudder of fear. It was pleasant and vigorous. Only the Warmaster could make an Astartes feel that.
'Friends.' Horus said. His voice was like honey, like steel, like a whisper, like all of those things mixed as one. 'My dear friends and comrades of the 63rd Expedition, is it really that time again?'
Laughter rippled around the deck, and from the galleries above.
'Briefing time.' Horus chuckled, 'and I salute you all for coming here to bear the tedium of yet another session. I promise I'll keep you no longer than is necessary. First though...'
Horus jumped back down off the dais and stooped to place a sheltering arm around the tiny shoulders of the man who had accompanied him out of the inner chamber, like a father showing off a small child to his brothers. So embraced, the man fixed a stiff, sickly grin upon his face, more a desperate grimace than a show of pleasure.
'Before we begin.' Horus said, 'I want to talk about my good friend Peeter Egon Momus here. How I deserved... pardon me, how humanity deserved an architect as fine and gifted as this, I don't know. Peeter has been telling me about his designs for the new High City here, and they are wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful.'
'Really, I don't know, my lord...' Momus harrumphed, his rictus trembling. The architect designate was beginning to shake, enduring direct exposure to such supreme attention.
'Our lord the Emperor himself sent Peeter to us,' Horus told them. 'He knew his worth. You see, I don't want to conquer. Conquest of itself is so messy, isn't it Ezekyle?'
Yes, lord.' Abaddon murmured.
'How can we draw the lost outposts of man back into one harmonious whole if all we bring them is conquest? We are duty-bound to leave them better than we found them, enlightened by the communication of the Imperial Truth and dazzlingly made over as august provinces of our wide estate. This expedition - and all expeditions - must look to the future and be mindful that what we leave in our wake must stand as an enduring statement of our intent, especially upon worlds, as here, where we have been forced to inflict damage in the promulgation of our message. We must leave legacies behind us. Imperial cities, monuments to the new age, and fitting memorials to those who have fallen in the struggle to establish it. Peeter, my friend Peeter here, understands this. I urge you all to take the time to visit his workshops and review his marvellous schemes. And I look forward to seeing the genius of his vision gracing all the new cities we build in the course of our crusade.'
Applause broke out.
'A-all the new cities...' Momus coughed.
'Peeter is the man for the job.' Horus cried, ignoring the architect's muted gasp. 'I am at one with the way he perceives architecture as celebration. He understands, like no other, I believe, how the spirit of the crusade may be realised in steel and glass and stone. What we raise up is far more important than what we strike down. What we leave behind us, men must admire for eternity, and say "This was well done indeed. This is what the Imperium means, and without it we would be shadows". For that, Peeter's our man. Let's laud him now!'
A huge explosion of applause rang out across the vast chamber. Many officers in the command tiers below joined in. Peeter Egon Momus looked slightly glazed as he was led off the strategium by an aide.
Horus leapt back onto the dais. 'Let's begin... my worthy adept?'
Regulus stepped towards the edge of the dais and put a polished machine-cog down delicately on the lip of the ouslite. When he spoke, his voice was augmented and inhuman, like an electric wind brushing through the boughs of steel trees. 'My lord Warmaster, the Mechanicum is satisfied with this rock. We continue to study, with great interest, the technologies captured here. The gravitic and phasic weapons are being reverse-engineered in our forges. At last report, three standard template construct patterns, previously unknown to us, have been recovered.'
Horus clapped his hands together. 'Glory to our brothers of the tireless Mechanicum! Slowly, we piece together the missing parts of humanity's knowledge. The Emperor will be delighted, as will, I'm sure, your Martian lords.'
Regulus nodded, lifting up the cog and stepping back from the dais.
Horus looked around. 'Rakris? My dear Rakris?'
Lord Governor Elect Rakris, a portly man in dove-grey robes, had already placed his sceptre-wand on the edge of the dais to mark his participation. Now he fiddled with it as he made his report. Horus heard him out patiently, nodding encouragingly from time to time.
Rakris droned on, at unnecessary length. Loken felt sorry for him. One of Lord Commander Varvaras's generals, Rakris had been selected to remain at Sixty-Three Nineteen as governor overseer, marshalling the occupation forces as the world transmuted into a full Imperial state. Rakris was a career soldier, and it was clear that, though he took his election as a signal honour, he was quite aghast at the prospect of being left behind. He looked pale and ill, brooding on the time, not long away, when the expedition fleet left him to manage the work alone. Rakris was Terran born, and Loken knew that once the fleet sailed on and left him to his job, Rakris would feel as abandoned as if he had been marooned. A governorship was intended to be the ultimate reward for a war-hero's service, but it seemed to Loken a quietly terrible fate: to be monarch of a world, and then cast away upon it.
Forever.
The crusade would not be back to visit conquered worlds in a hurry.
'.. .in truth, my commander.' Rakris was saying, 'it may be many decades until this world achieves a state of equity with the Imperium. There is great opposition.'
'How far are we from compliance?' Horus asked, looking around.
Varvaras replied. 'True compliance, lord? Decades, as my good friend Rakris says. Functional compliance? Well, that is different. There is a seed of dissidence in the southern hemisphere that we cannot quench. Until that is brought into line, this world cannot be certified.'
Horus nodded. 'So we stay here, if we must, until the job is done. We must hold over our plans to advance. Such a shame...' The primarch's smile faded for a second as he pondered. 'U |
mpliance?' Horus asked, looking around.
Varvaras replied. 'True compliance, lord? Decades, as my good friend Rakris says. Functional compliance? Well, that is different. There is a seed of dissidence in the southern hemisphere that we cannot quench. Until that is brought into line, this world cannot be certified.'
Horus nodded. 'So we stay here, if we must, until the job is done. We must hold over our plans to advance. Such a shame...' The primarch's smile faded for a second as he pondered. 'Unless there is another suggestion?'
He looked at Abaddon and let the words hang. Abaddon seemed to hesitate, and glanced quickly back into the shadows behind him.
Loken realised that this was the question. This was a moment of counsel when the primarch looked outside the official hierarchy of the expedition's command echelon for the informal advice of his chosen inner circle.
Torgaddon nudged Loken, but the nudge was unnecessary. Loken had already stepped forward into the light behind Abaddon.
'My lord Warmaster.' Loken said, almost startled by the sound of his own voice.
'Captain Loken.' Horus said with a delighted flash of his eyes. The thoughts of the Moumival are always welcome at my counsel.'
Several present, including Varvaras, made approving sounds.
'My lord, the initial phase of the war here was undertaken quickly and cleanly.' Loken said. 'A surgical strike by the speartip against the enemy's head to minimise the loss and hardship that both sides would suffer in a longer, full-scale offensive. A guerilla war against insurgents would inevitably be an arduous, drawn out, costly affair. It could last for years without resolution, eroding Lord Commander Varvaras's precious army resources and blighting any good beginning of the Lord Governor Elect's rale. Sixty-Three Nineteen cannot afford it, and neither can the expedition. I say, and if I speak out of turn, forgive me, I say that if the speartip was meant to conquer this world in one, clean blow, it has failed. The work is not yet done. Order the Legion to finish the job.'
Murmuring sprang up all around. You'd have me unleash the Luna Wolves again, captain?' Horus asked.
Loken shook his head. 'Not the Legion as a whole, sir. Tenth Company. We were first in, and for that we have been praised, but the praise was not deserved, for the job is not done.'
Horus nodded, as if quite taken with this. Varvaras?'
The army always welcomes the support of the noble Legion. The insurgent factions might plague my men for months, as the captain rightly points out, and make a great tally of killing before they are done with. A company of Luna Wolves could crush them utterly and end their mutiny.'
'Rakris?'
'An expedient solution would be a weight off my back, sir.' Rakris said. He smiled. 'It would be a hammer to crash a nut, perhaps, but it would be emphatic. The work would be done, and quickly.'
'First captain?'
The Mournival speaks with one voice, lord.' Abaddon said. 'I urge for a swift conclusion to our business here, so that Sixty-Three Nineteen can get on with its life, and we can get on with the crusade.'
'So it shall be.' Horus said, smiling broadly again. 'So I make a command of it. Captain, have Tenth Company drawn ready and oathed to the moment. We will anticipate news of your success eagerly. Thank you for speaking your mind plainly, and for cutting to the quick of this thorny problem.'
There was a firm flutter of approving applause.
Then possibilities open for us after all.' Horus said. 'We can begin to prepare for the next phase. When I signal him...' Horus looked at the blind Mistress of Astropaths, who nodded silently '...our beloved Emperor will be delighted to learn that our portion of the crusade is about to advance again. We should now discuss the options open to us. I thought to brief you on our findings concerning these myself, but there is another who positively insists he is fit to do it.'
Everyone present turned to look as the plate glass doors slid open for a second time. The primarch began to clap, and the applause gathered and swept around the galleries, as Maloghurst limped out onto the stage of the strategium. It was the equerry's first formal appearance since his recovery from the surface.
Maloghurst was a veteran Luna Wolf, and a 'Son of Horus' to boot. He had been in his time a company captain, and might even have risen to the first captaincy had he not been promoted to the office of equerry. A shrewd and experienced soul, Maloghurst's talents for intrigue and intelligence ideally served him in that role, and had long since earned him the title 'twisted'. He took no shame in this. The Legion might protect the Warmaster physically, but he protected him politically, guiding and advising, blocking and out-playing, aware and perfectly sensitive to every nuance and current in the expedition's hierarchy. He had never been well-liked, for he was a hard man to get close to, even by the intimidating standards of the Astartes, and he had never made any particular effort to be liked. Most thought of him as a neutral power, a facilitator, loyal only to Horus himself. No one was ever foolish enough to underestimate him.
But circumstance had suddenly made him popular. Beloved almost. Believed dead, he had been found alive, and in the light of Sejanus's death, this had been taken as some compensation. The work of the remembrancer Euphrati Keeler had cemented his new role as the noble, wounded hero as the picts of his unexpected rescue had flashed around the fleet. Now the assembly welcomed him back rapturously, cheering his fortitude and resolve. He had been reinvented through misfortune into an adored hero.
Loken was quite sure Maloghurst was aware of this ironic turn, and fully prepared to make the most of it.
Maloghurst came out into the open. His injuries had been so severe that he was not yet able to clothe himself in the armour of the Legion, and wore instead a white robe with the wolfs head emblem embroidered on the back. A gold signet in the shape of the Warmaster's icon, the staring eye, formed the cloak's clasp under his throat. He limped, and walked with the aid of a metal staff. His back bulged with a kyphotic misalignment. His face, drawn thin and pale since last it had been seen, was lined with effort, and waddings of synthetic skin-gel covered gashes upon his throat and the left side of his head.
Loken was shocked to see that he was now truly twisted. The old, mocking nickname suddenly seemed crass and indelicate.
Horus got down off the dais and threw his arms around his equerry. Varvaras and Abaddon both went over to greet him with warm embraces. Maloghurst smiled, and nodded to them, then nodded and waved up to the galleries around to acknowledge the welcome. As the applause abated, Maloghurst leaned heavily against the side of the dais, and placed his staff upon it in the ceremonial manner. Instead of returning to his place, the Warmaster stood back, away from the circle, giving his equerry centre stage.
'I have enjoyed.' Maloghurst began, his voice hard, but brittle with effort, 'a certain luxury of relaxation in these last few days.' Laughter rattled out from all sides, and the clapping resumed for a moment.
'Bed rest.' Maloghurst went on, 'that bane of a warrior's life, has suited me well, for it has given me ample opportunity to review the intelligence gathered in these last few months by our advance scouts. However, bed rest, as a thing to be enjoyed, has its limits. I insisted that I be allowed to present this evidence to you today for, Emperor bless me, never in my dreams did I imagine I would die of inaction.'
More approving laughter. Loken smiled. Maloghurst really was making the best use of his new status amongst them. He was almost... likable.
To review.' Maloghurst said, taking out a control wand and gesturing with it briefly. Three key areas are of interest to us at this juncture.' His gestures activated the underdeck hololithic projectors, and shapes of solid light came into being above the strategium, projected so that all in the galleries could see them. The first was a rotating image of the world they orbited, surrounded by graphic indicators of elliptical alignment and precession. The spinning world shrank rapidly until it became part of a system arrangement, similarly draped in schematic overlays, a turning, three-dimensional orrery suspended in the air. Then that too shrank and became a small, highlighted component in a mosaic of stars.
'First.' Maloghurst said, 'this area here, itemised eight fifty-eight one-seven, the cluster adjacent to our current locale.' A particular stellar neighbourhood on the light map glowed. 'Our most obvious and accessible next port of call. Scout ships report eighteen systems of interest, twelve of which promise fundamental worth in terms of elemental resource, but no signs of life or habitation. The searches are not yet conclusive, but at this early juncture might I be so bold as to suggest that this region need not concern the expedition. Subject to certification, these systems should be added to the manifest of the colonial pioneers who follow in our footsteps.'
He waved the wand again, and a different group of stars lit up. This second region, estimated as... Master?'
Boas Comnenus cleared his throat and obligingly said, 'Nine weeks, standard travel time to spinward of us, equerry.'
'Nine weeks to spinward, thank you.' Maloghurst replied. 'We have barely begun to scout this district, but there are early indications that some significant culture or cultures, of interstellar capability, exist within its bounds.'
'Currently functioning?' Abaddon asked. Too often, Imperial expeditions came upon the dry traces of long perished societies in the desert of stars.
Too early to tell, first captain.' Maloghurst said. Though the scouts report some discovered relics bear similarities to those we found on seven ninety-three one-five half a decade ago.'
'So, not human?' |
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