by Guy Haley
The first thing that hit Guilliman was the smell. There was a sickening sweetness in the room, of failing organs and decaying flesh. It made Guilliman’s eyes water. Sweat prickled his brow as his post-human biology marshalled itself to fight off infection, and the devices of the Armour of Fate shifted into a higher state of activity.
It was possible that Bazhiri was correct, and that there would be something in that room that could affect him, perhaps a last gambit of Mortarion. His incisive mind weighed all these possibilities, but he was not concerned. He could not know he would be safe, no theoretical could support that, but somehow he believed it.
He approached the bed, pushing his way through the plastek sheeting, unafraid of contamination.
The priest stared up at the ceiling, still in his repose but for the rising and falling of his chest, and even that was not his doing, for machines breathed for him. When he inhaled and exhaled he did so to the click-hiss of a pulmonary stimulator plugged into his chest.
‘Militant-apostolic?’
Mathieu did not move.
‘Mathieu,’ Guilliman said softly. He examined his emotions. He had expected anger. He had anticipated grudging acceptance; the priest had done a great service, after all. He had experienced confusion recently, and that was an emotion he was not fond of. But seeing the priest like that, gripped by a dozen different diseases at once, what he felt most was pity.
The crusts at the corners of Mathieu’s eyes lifted. His face moved. Very slightly, he turned his head towards the primarch. It took a moment for his expression to clear, and his eyes to focus.
‘My lord, is that you?’
‘It is I,’ said Guilliman, not sure if Mathieu saw him.
‘Yes, yes, the regent,’ said Mathieu as if that confirmed it all. His eyes closed and opened, and he swallowed, all actions performed with a glacial slowness. ‘You came.’
‘I heard you wished to speak with me. I could not deny a dying man his last request.’
‘You considered it though,’ said Mathieu. He smiled. The skin on his lips cracked and bled.
‘I was debating the mer–’
‘You do not need to explain yourself, my lord. We are moved by the Emperor, you and I. We have little choice over our actions.’
‘So you believe.’
‘So I know!’ A little energy came into him, and he moved a hand encased by tubes. ‘And so do you. You have witnessed it, His power. You have seen the light.’
‘I must disappoint you. I do not believe that my creator is a god,’ said Guilliman. ‘He is something…’ He paused. ‘He is something else, if He is anything at all. All this faith and desire for salvation is a blind hope. He will not help us. He cannot. We must save ourselves.’
‘A shame. A shame,’ Mathieu said. His voice was a vox-ghost on an unreliable channel, fading in and out of audibility. ‘This would be so much easier if you believed. Perhaps you can’t. I do not think it is your fault either way.’ He sighed, and seemed to shrink into himself, as if every breath depleted him. ‘You must listen to me, carefully. Your father supports me, but His strength is needed elsewhere.’
‘Then speak, militant-apostolic, I am listening.’
‘This is my final gospel, and it is the finest news of all. The Emperor is waking, my lord.’ Mathieu smiled. ‘He stirs from His slumber after long millennia. The armies of the faithful trail Him, they bear Him aloft, they empower Him.’
Guilliman had his own opinions on this, but now was not the time to voice them.
‘How?’
‘It is the warp, my lord,’ croaked Mathieu. ‘The enemy has made his greatest mistake by opening the Rift. It may damn the Imperium, but it also may save it. The Rift has empowered the Emperor. The energy of the empyrean saturates the universe, raising up mankind, filling the lowliest psyker with power.’
‘The rise in psychic incidence across the Imperium. This is what you speak of.’
Mathieu managed a tiny nod. The movement broke pustules on his neck that wept clear fluid. ‘Yes. Your father is the greatest psyker of them all. How could He not be affected?’
‘Then why does He not step down from His Throne? If He is capable of acting, why must I do His work for Him?’
‘He is not ready, that is why,’ said Mathieu. ‘Not yet. You must help Him.’
‘And how would I do that?’ said Guilliman neutrally.
‘I cannot answer that. It is your task.’ Again a painful swallow. Mathieu took a moment before speaking again. His words were a precious currency, and he was fast running out of coin. ‘He has spent millennia arranging the pieces so that you might return, my lord. You are His only hope. You are mankind’s only hope.’ A look of pain played over his face. ‘We all have our part to play. Yours is to come. Mine is done.’
His eyes closed, and his next words were weaker still.
‘Rejoice, Roboute Guilliman, and give your praise.’ Mathieu’s head sank further into the pillow, smearing the plastek covering with fluids. ‘Praise be, the Emperor is awakening. You must guide His return. You came back. He can come back.’
‘You have a fool’s optimism.’
Mathieu smiled a final time. ‘You deny the evidence of your own experiences. You know it to be true. You will find a way. Have faith in your father… and all… will be well.’
Mathieu’s head rolled to the side.
Guilliman turned the man’s face back to him. Though the smile remained, his spirit had gone, and the primarch thought he had never seen such a look of profound peace on any man.
He almost left, then bent low to whisper to the corpse.
‘My father is no god. It is men who do His work for Him, as I must now. He uses people. He always has.’ Guilliman stood up, and with an armoured hand reached down to close the dead priest’s eyes.
‘Thank you, Mathieu, for your service to the Imperium. I am sure when I tell your successor what you did, they will make you a saint, and I will not dissuade them.’
Chapter Forty-One
REMEMBRANCE
In the room there was an adjustable medical couch and a wide rank of inks in pots, and incense burned in every corner. It was paved with rough stones. Panels of the same rock covered the walls, all taken from the mountains of Honorum. Within, Chaplain Vul Direz awaited Justinian. Though a servitor stood inactive by the couch – a human torso on a delicate wheeled carriage – and elements of technology were visible throughout, it was as much a shaman’s cave as a room aboard a voidship.
Justinian was escorted in by a pair of hooded serfs, clad like him in robes that were quartered midnight blue and bone white. They were silent, striving sincerely to create an air of mystery that Justinian could take only half seriously. He was born in less superstitious times, and the pseudo-Legions of the Primaris cohort he began his service in were free of the centuries of accreted rites that all the Chapters of the firstborn were prone to.
‘Brother-Sergeant Parris,’ said the Chaplain, his lugubrious voice invested with a certain power by occasion. ‘You are ready to accept your first honour mark?’
‘I am,’ said Justinian.
‘Do you submit yourself to the ritual of remembrancing?’
‘I do.’
‘Then recline,’ said Direz.
Justinian got onto the couch. It rose up to human chest height so the servitor could more easily do its work.
‘I have taken the liberty of suggesting a design, as you are still new to our ways.’ Direz crooked a finger. One of the human serfs went to a stainless steel table and took up a piece of paper. It was folded in half to hide its contents, and the serf smoothed it out to display this to Justinian at Direz’s command.
Upon it was a stylised image of Justinian, a serpent wrapped around him that Justinian had just beheaded. Three drops of blood spurted from its neck, and its head was pinned under one of his feet.
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‘Ordinarily we take the image of our defeated foe, or some other memorable element of the action to be commemorated,’ explained Direz. ‘A fortress, a weapon, but in these circumstances it is forbidden. To wear a depiction of the Great Enemy on our skin brings ill fortune. The same goes for the blighted land in which you fought, and the artefact you helped destroy. In this case, we must rely on allegory. Do you approve?’
Justinian looked at the artwork, then into the red lenses of the Chaplain’s skull helm.
‘I cannot.’
The Chaplain’s helm tilted in question.
‘I want this.’ Justinian took out a printout on a semi-translucent flimsy. It was a pict-capture taken from his helm vid-feed, and showed the face of the girl they had encountered upon the island near the town of Hiastamus. Vul Direz took the print and looked at it.
‘I want this child on my neck,’ Justinian said.
‘She is no foe,’ said Direz.
‘And yet I slew her,’ said Justinian.
A hard exhalation growled out of Direz’s respirator mask, amplified by his voxmitter.
‘I heard what occurred on the planet,’ the Chaplain said. ‘Be advised that those people would have died anyway, and that Third Company Lieutenant Edermo was right to order you to do what you did. Imagine what would have occurred if even one of them had lived, and through them the enemy had learned of the mission. It would have failed, the artefact would remain, the primarch might well be dead and Ultramar lost in the warp.’
‘It was we who had to pull the triggers,’ said Justinian. ‘They saw us as saviours, and we killed them.’
‘It was a dark deed done for the best of reasons,’ said Direz. ‘These are terrible times. The future of our species hangs in the balance. You have given up your life so that we might survive. In their own way, they had to give up theirs.’
‘Nevertheless, I will take a tattoo of the image I have given to you. It is my wish.’ He looked up at Vul Direz from the marking couch. ‘I understand that to you of Honourum my request is strange. But I understand also that according to your custom the nature of each marking is the choice of the individual warrior. I do not wish to remember this action through the image you presented to me.’
‘I see,’ said Vul Direz quietly, and Justinian could tell the Chaplain was weighing the worth of his soul. ‘I will ask you why, then, that you choose this dishonour for yourself?’
‘You misunderstand, Brother-Chaplain,’ said Justinian, settling back into the couch. ‘I do not feel dishonour. I do not punish myself. It sorrowed me to do it, but it had to happen.’
‘Then why take this image?’
‘Honours may become chains that keep us from our purpose. The allure of glory corrupts. I take this image not in penance, but so that I do not forget our duty as warriors of the Emperor, and protectors of humanity. I take it because I would remember that sometimes we must kill what we seek to protect in order to protect it.’
Vul Direz gave a grunt of approval. Justinian had been judged and had passed whatever test the Chaplain had applied to him.
‘Very well. The child it is.’ He stood back with a purr of motors and beckoned to the servitor. With an ugly jerk it came to life, as if started from sleep by a noise in the night.
‘This child, one inch by two, in the position of the first honour.’ Direz showed it the image. Its bionic left eye clicked, sectioning the picture for processing and transformation into art.
‘Compliance,’ it wheezed, and pivoted on its wheels. It dipped needled fingers into pots of ink with a dexterity that belied its otherwise unsteady motions. Pistons clicked. Pipes wheezed. The small bottles screwed onto the bones of its hands filled with colours, and a small pump spun into life.
‘The Emperor has chosen you well, brother,’ said Direz.
‘Do you think He moves among us?’ said Justinian.
‘Explain yourself, brother.’
‘Did you truly mean that? Was I chosen? Does the Emperor move? The priest gabbled something to me through his pain when we returned to the fleet. What I saw there made me think.’
‘Never trust the words of the Adeptus Ministorum,’ said Direz. ‘They make a man into a god.’
‘Then what I witnessed was not He?’
Direz chose his next words carefully. ‘One does not need to be a god to wield the influence of one. I do not need to believe that the Emperor is a god to be sure of His power. Undoubtedly, He reached out and touched Iax. These are terrible times, as I said, but they are glorious also.’
The servitor’s wheels squeaked. The whole delicate-looking assembly shook over the gaps in the uneven paving. Little tremors ran through it as it came to rest by the couch.
‘Present chosen site for marking.’ Its original vocal cords were still in place, but weak from infrequency of use, and its voice was a chilling rasp.
With some trepidation, Justinian turned his head aside to expose his neck to the creaking cyborg, but though it bent uncertainly down a change came over it once in position, and its fingers moved with deftness, sure and quick, needles stabbing into his neck at uniform depth and speed.
He had been told that sometimes, a Novamarine might experience a trip to the Shadow Novum unbidden during the remembrancing – the strange meditative state they induced in themselves – but Justinian felt nothing but the pinch of the needle points. The only vision he’d experienced was a flash of burning as Guilliman unleashed voidship killers to cleanse Iax in order to save as much of it as he could. He’d watched along with many of his new brothers. It was rare to witness atomic cleansing so clinically applied.
His mind drifted further, though still not to Honourum. He remembered his years in the Unnumbered Sons, first with others of his kind, and towards the end mixed in with all the gene-lines. Felix, always so serious. Bjarni, heartbroken that he would not return to Fenris. Many others, brief fraternities, sundered by assignment to Ultima Chapters, as reinforcements to the firstborn, and far too many by death.
All in the past, all gone. A new life awaited. A brotherhood forever. Each stab of the needles overwrote old loyalties with new, but he swore he would never forget.
Then it was done. The biting at his neck ceased. A subsidiary arm unfolded from the servitor’s chest and wiped at his skin with a wet rag, bringing the sting of counterseptic. He made to move, but the servitor said with surprising force, ‘Remain still.’
One of the human serfs came forward and placed a dressing over his tattoo.
‘There,’ said Vul Direz. He returned to Parris’ side. ‘I welcome you to the Novamarines, Justinian Parris, though the welcome has always been here. I understand it has been hard to give up one brotherhood for another. You were torn, but no longer. You are now one of us completely and utterly.’
Vul Direz held out his hand upright for Justinian to grasp. He did so, and Vul Direz pulled him up off the couch, bringing him close in to his chest in a half-embrace.
‘My thanks, brother. I swear to serve the Novamarines faithfully until the day of my death, and through their good offices, the Emperor of Man.’
‘I am sure of it,’ said Vul Direz. ‘For Honourum and the memory of Lucretius Corvo.’
‘For Honourum and the memory of Lucretius Corvo,’ Justinian responded.
Chapter Forty-Two
OTHER FORMS
Rotigus hunted carefully for his rival, and it took him a very long time. The groves of gnarlwoods stretched into an infinity of rot. From their boughs depended slick birthing sacs, each one burgeoning with the promise of rebirth. Decay and renewal, life and death, the gnarlwoods epitomised Nurgle’s cycle, and ordinarily Rotigus felt a thrilling sense of belonging there, a charging of the soul. To be part of such purpose, and to see the truths of his lord presented to him in metaphysical form as solid as himself, gave him a heightened sense of joy, and he wandered there whenever he could
. But the occasion was far from ordinary, and that took much away from his victory. He felt as hollow as the trees, rotted out from inside with no new, wriggling life to replace what was lost. He and every other aspect of the Great Grandfather felt the same, for at the beginning and at the end, they were all a part of him.
Wound the garden, wound the god.
The neverground shook. There were whispers in the hierarchy that perhaps the burns would never heal, and that Nurgle tossed uneasily in his sleep with the pain. The upheavals in the liquid earth would last for some aeons to come, at the very least, like loose bowels incapable of rest. Rotigus could taste it on the air, a clean burning in Nurgle’s holy foetor. He could feel it in his soul as a hot scar. He shifted his gut around to settle the pain, and it did not work. The mouth in his belly and arm were sealed tight in discomfort.
It would not do to dwell on it.
‘I am not Ku’Gath,’ he said to himself, ‘full of misery and woe.’ He felt disquieted though, gassy, full of painful bubbles. He sighed and pressed his ear against another slimy trunk, and knocked. The things in the birthing sacs hanging from the branches jiggled, but the noise was unsatisfactory, and he moved on to the next tree.
‘A setback is not a defeat, and a defeat does not mean the loss of a war. Chaos is eternal. Often, it is simply a matter of waiting, isn’t it, my friends?’ He addressed this to the daemons in their pods, but they responded only to the knocks upon their mother-plants. They were deaf to his words while they slept.
He sighed, and splashed broad-footed through the mires and the bogs, pushed his way through stands of pink-lipped flowers that gave out leper’s moans when touched. Lazy yellow flies hummed about, lethargic to the point of death. As usual in the garden, it was hot, and sticky, and everything was either in a state of frenzied growth or extravagant decay. Another thing that would ordinarily gladden him, but not that day.
He stopped from time to time to knock on the sodden trunks of further promising trees, but after embracing and listening carefully to each, he would tut, shake his head, and shamble on to the next grove, the next brake, the next copse, until he had walked a million miles and an aeon had passed in the garden.
