by David Guymer
Alongside the Iron Father went Apothecary Dumaar, Iron Chaplain Braavos and the skeletal figurine of Magos Qarismi. Chapter Master Alfaran was accompanied only by his Dreadnought seneschal, Galvarro, and a five-man honour guard of morbidly outfitted veterans. Jalenghaal recalled a mention of them in Kristos’ simulus files, an elite unit that stood separate from the Hospitallers’ peculiar three-company structure called The Vigil.
Martial displays were not something to which the Iron Hands were frequently disposed, but forty Space Marines was no small show of strength, and Jalenghaal did approve of demonstrating strength.
Greater worlds than Fabris Callivant had been brought to heel with less.
There was a shuddering as the thousand year-old stanchions holding the arena rockrete above seven kilometres of aching nothing took the strain of four moving Knights. They pincered the Space Marine column.
Another group closed from the opposite direction.
On an ordinary meet day, the tunnel that ran through the lower middle of the colosseum’s seating would have been for the passage of tournament Knights and, occasionally, captured xenos monstrosities from House Callivant’s distant warzones. Today, a small company of human dignitaries and skitarii legionaries marched through the cavernous structure and under the raised portcullis, instantly bedraggled by the rain.
Two men led them.
The first was an older man, insofar as Jalenghaal could judge, somewhere around one or two hundred years of age, with the stretched, colour-drained pallor of late-stage rejuvenat dependency. Princeps Fabris himself. He was shorter than Jalenghaal had expected from his battlefield reputation, though of course it took no heroic build to command from the Throne Mechanicum of an Imperial Knight. A prominent lower jaw and a thick bottom lip made him appear somewhat simple. A genetically misshapen lump of a head was peppered with a recently implanted crop of greyish hair. His declining physique was held in by a maroon-and-sable armoured bodyglove, flush with gold braid and ornate battle honours.
The other was a tech-priest of august rank and, judging by the improvements he had made to himself, warlike aspect. The dense material of his robes scattered Jalenghaal’s auspex probes and denied further intrusion.
The two parties met under the fluttering pennons and downturned weapons of the Callivantine Knights. The rain lashed uncaringly across them all.
‘I am Princeps Fabris of House Callivant, sixty-fifth of that name,’ the old man declared, the booming diction of a master orator emerging from the inbred bulge of his lips. He executed a bow, first to Alfaran, and then again to Kristos. ‘I am honoured to bid you both welcome to my world.’ He straightened and smiled, as if that were the formalities dealt with, and spread his hands towards the Knights that flanked them. ‘We have prepared an exhibition tournament in your honour.’
Alfaran raised a kohled eyebrow.
‘Now?’ asked Braavos
Jalenghaal watched Kristos. The Iron Father said nothing however. The glow of his optic slits cycled, a mute display of local omniscience that was clearly having an unsettling effect on Fabris’ human staff.
‘Now more than ever!’ Fabris declared, his altered psychology seemingly immune to the effects. ‘Let our people see the might of their Knights in action!’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper that only the genhanced acuity of a Space Marine would detect. The gathered Adeptus Astartes towered over him, the way gods were made to tower over mortal men, but he spoke to them as he would from the Throne Mechanicum of an Imperial Knight. ‘One of my ancestors described the tournament as the stimulant of the aristocracy and the opiate of the peasantry. It is time now for both. And all that must be discussed can be discussed while needs are succoured, would you not agree?’
Alfaran nodded in agreement.
Kristos, still, gave no reaction.
‘It seems you have considered everything,’ said Magos Qarismi, smoothly.
‘You have remade yourself substantially since Columnus, Kristos.’ The tech-priest that had entered the arena with Fabris clanked ahead of his skitarii bodyguards. ‘I approve.’
Princeps Fabris executed a half-bow, and when he rose, he held both arms extended to present his companion. ‘Forgive me, but I understand that my good friend and ally Fabricator-Locum Exar Sevastian requires no introduction.’
V
Exar Sevastian’s forge-temple was not one building. It was a tumorous conglomeration of manufactories, refineries, steaming rad-bins and worker habs, sprawled over half a kilometre and through several vertical tiers. Dirty-faced men, women and children moved through the fumes, crunched in like scrap in a compactor. Harsid had remained with the shuttle, as had Mohr. The greenskins aren’t so close yet that a pair of Deathwatch Space Marines can move through the slaveholdings of the fabricator-locum unnoticed. Nor were landing zones so abundant that an overworked aeronautica controller would not look to have the craft removed, authority codes or no authority codes, if it was not guarded.
‘There is no more time left,’ Harsid had told Rauth as he and Laana had disembarked. ‘We must go in, grab our man now and find where the Dawnbreak Technology has been hidden. Either that or we take our chances with Kristos and the Omnipotence.’
No thank you.
The structure that Laana had brought him to was to the side of a condemned storehouse. Khrysaar is in there, somewhere. The sloping metal and close tin walls funnelled the aircraft noise into the alleyways, clashing there with the clangour of the manufactories. Rusted scaffolding clung to the corrugated walls. Rauth could not tell which was responsible for holding up which. Perhaps both contributed a little. Warning posters peeled under the incessant rain, marking the structure for repurposing, but the work schedule had obviously slipped as the Callivantine foundries struggled to maintain ancestral levels of production. The need for new storehouses was not what it was.
The assassin approached the single guard on the door.
He was a big man. Abhuman big. Almost as large as Rauth. His face was flattened and broad, blotched like a rusty shovel. A thick metal band rimmed it like a bandana, machined into the bone by thick screws. His graft-swollen chest was criss-crossed with red leather straps and he hefted a stripped-down version of an ogryn ripper gun.
Rauth grunted and shut his eyes. I’ve been here before. A memory of this man bubbled up from his subconscious. He saw himself dropping a silver guilder into the muscle-brute’s open palm, a toothless smirk, being ushered inside, an utterance of ‘He’s expecting you, Janis’, then feeling afraid. He shook his head and stared hard at the wall. Rainwater ran down the old metal in rivulets. It spotted his eyelashes as he blinked. The switched cog emblem of the Frateris Aequalis had been spray-painted underneath the flapping end of an old hazard poster. They really haven’t been trying to hide, have they? Yazir has found the place, all right.
‘The pits are full,’ said the guard, slurring his words, as if his tongue had been subjected to the same muscular over-growth as the rest of his body. ‘And the magi aren’t in the habit of picking up meat at the door.’
Laana leaned in. ‘Two guilders.’
‘Five.’
‘Three.’
‘Five.’
‘Four.’
The gene-bred colossus cracked a grin. He held a chewed stub round between his teeth. ‘Six.’
Not as stupid as he’s been made to look.
‘All right,’ Laana grumbled, fishing in the pocket of her underlayers. She had shed the guise of the House serf for this expedition and had adopted instead the garb of an off-shift manufactorum labourer: a baggy umber jumpsuit plastered in rad sigils and draped in a waxy shawl. She opened a purse and dropped six silver guilders in his hand, one at a time, looking over her shoulder all the while.
‘In then,’ said the guard, thumping on the door with the butt of his ripper gun. ‘Ask for Armedius. Tell him there’s been a logging error.�
�
Thanking him, Laana turned back and whistled. Rauth suppressed a scowl and lurched towards her. Just another cybermantically animated piece of skin for the pits.
The storehouse receiving chamber was a smoke-filled sump of moral corrosion and material decay. Men and women in oil-stained overalls stumbled from push to shove, slurring greetings and curses and racing one another headlong for the proverbial gutter. A display of cyborgised gladiators were lined up below a clacking flapboard. Burned, yellowed, infected hands pawed at the bodies. Drooping eyes. Drooled utterances of wonderment as fingers pinched at smooth metal and gene-hardened musculature. A woman hobbled towards Rauth, only to veer away, a flicker of transhuman dread confusing the self-administered befuddlement in her eyes.
Rauth clenched his fists. He despised the closeness, the scrutiny. The warmth of so many touching bodies was exacerbated by his genetically lowered core temperature, making him feel several degrees too hot and emulating the feeling of anger.
Emulating.
Of course.
An echo sounding of mangled binaric clicked from somewhere in the lho pall and the school of bodies dispersed.
A tech-priest shambled towards Rauth. Armedius? Rauth frowned hard to keep his expression from changing as another bilious spew of remembrance threatened. This one did not arise from the augmentician Janis Gelt, whom he had consumed earlier. He could feel his bionics seizing, illogic loops of resentment and loathing causing them to clamp down hard. Blood rushed behind his ears, driven not by a pumping organ but by a mechanical motor with a spirit of its own, and that spirit was offended by what he was seeing. The tech-priest was a shabby creature, a scavenger insect evolved to an existence in the human swamp. His trailing robes were mouldy and full of holes. He reeked of contaminated spirits. The emblem of the Frateris Aequalis had been stitched into his robes in yellow thread.
In your own house, Sevastian. For complicity or inaction, there is a reckoning coming for you.
The priest held up an arm tool and sprayed Rauth with diagnostic lasers. He issued a blurt of scrapcode, then stencilled the numerals seven-seven-five on Rauth’s chest. ‘Apologies, Mistress Valorrn,’ he said. ‘The logging error has been rectified. Deposit your fighter in bin iota.’
Rauth felt his fingers digging into the skin of his chest above his bionic heart. The urge to rip out the mechanical motor was almost there.
Almost.
There.
With an epileptic jerk of the head, Rauth forced his fingers to unclench.
Laana glanced sharply back at him. She could receive binaric signals, but could not send. She spoke into the thick collar of her shawl, trusting to Rauth’s hearing to pick it up over the din. ‘Once inside I will assist Yazir in searching for the adept you described from the augmentician’s remembrances. Then we will put him to the question.’
She turned fully around and looked up. ‘Maintain the disguise. Fight whatever they put against you.’ Her sudden smile was like splintering ice. ‘And try not to die before we have him.’
VI
Fabris’ skitarii cohort fanned out onto the armoured dais, weapons primed and humming as though expecting lurking foes even here in the heart of the princeps’ own amphitheatre. Jalenghaal behaved no differently when he, Tartrak and Ulikar followed them through. The platform was a hefty cutaway set directly above the arena tunnel. Tiers of seating climbed stepwise left and right, a transparent dome of age-splintered armourglass sealing the dais against the changeable nature of the elements and the Callivantine nobility. The rain drummed on the glass, a seditious mumble that ran through the enclosed sphere. The cyborg legionaries chittered in code before turning on their heels and training their guns inwards.
canted Tartrak.
added Jalenghaal.
Ignoring the ready display of weaponry, Princeps Fabris strolled towards the grand table overlooking the arena stage, poured himself a tall glass of wine and sat down in his throne. Its high back was splayed in a stylistic rendering of a heart, patterned with iron weave filled with purple velvet. The chair emitted a grinding noise as soon as it took the princeps’ weight, the richly appointed seat rising on a concealed hydraulic lift until he sat above the heads of his transhuman guests. The flanking chairs, standard affairs of aluminium alloy caparisoned with the colours of House Callivant, were too small for an armoured transhuman, so Kristos and Alfaran remained standing.
Venerable Galvarro took position beside Chapter Master Alfaran. Exar Sevastian and Magos Qarismi stood with Kristos.
Braavos and Dumaar had remained arena-side with the three claves.
Tartrak canted in tetchy lingua-form, code-signifiers indicating Ulikar the intended recipient.
Emptying his glass in one long swallow, Fabris swirled the empty vessel and peered into the beating rain. A tabarded server hurried between the Iron Hands’ criss-crossing gunsights to pour him another. The princeps calmly relieved him of his ewer and shooed him away. He poured another tall measure and settled back, full glass in one hand, sloshing jug in the other.
‘Praise the Omnissiah for the timeliness of your arrival, Iron Father,’ he said, still watching the rain come down. ‘We could have met this without assistance, but assistance is welcomed nonetheless.’ He sipped at his wine, scowling as if it had soured since hitting the bottom of the glass. ‘Fabris Callivant is no longer a wealthy world. The cost would have been enormous.’ The princeps glanced sideways, but Kristos offered no response. He frowned, uncertainly, glanced at Alfaran who nodded, then downed another mouthful and turned back.
‘The plans for my world’s defence are obviously well advanced and cannot be altered now. Chapter Master Alfaran commands in the void, while Sevastian retains his Dominus status of old and has been granted generalship of all ground and aeronautica forces.’ Jalenghaal diverted a fraction of his attention to the auspex-dark form of the fabricator-locum, threat brackets suddenly spilling over the princeps’ hand as Fabris raised his glass. ‘Overall command, naturally, remains with me.’
‘Naturally,’ Alfaran agreed, unsmiling.
Kristos remained silent. Just the beetling whisper of his armour’s machine cant.
‘Have you nothing to contribute, Iron Father?’ asked Fabris.
Without a single armour section moving, Kristos’ helm rotated on its rings, bringing the currently illuminated lens into bearing with Fabris’ throne. The princeps swallowed. This time without wine.
‘You have not yet sought an opinion.’
Frowning, Fabris moistened his throat. ‘Then I will ask you this – how great a force do you bring with you?’
‘My ironbarque and two strike cruisers. One hundred and fifty Iron Hands plus war machines.’
Fabris clinked the foot of his wineglass against the arm of his throne. ‘Praise be to you, Iron Father. The Omnissiah blesses us all indeed. That is almost as many warriors as Chapter Master Alfaran has already pledged. Tell me, Iron Father, do your warriors favour battle in the void or here on the ground.’
‘We will deploy to the planet.’
‘Excellent. I will have Sevastian liaise with my strategos to draw up a–’
‘You misunderstand. Priority objectives have already been identified and orders assigned. Warriors will be deployed to them as soon as the Alloyed and the Brutus are in range.’
For a moment, Fabris’ lips worked without sound.
Leaving his threat locks to idle over the princeps, Jalenghaal glanced at Kristos.
Even to a warrior as old and holl
ow as Jalenghaal, there was something terrifying about Kristos. Encased in a bionic exoskeleton of up-armoured Terminator plate, the Iron Father was a monstrous physical presence, but that was not what troubled Jalenghaal, or the machine-spirit with whom he shared a body. Kristos was a noospheric blank, exquisitely constructed for data retention. Passing optics over the Iron Father flooded Jalenghaal’s helmet displays with refracted signals, as if he had directed an auspex beam at a bent mirror. While his systems scrubbed the static, he looked to Sevastian. The fabricator-locum was less perfect. A cursory reading of the magos’ auto-exloads and signal bleed-off confirmed that.
Unsure why, Jalenghaal ignored the Clan Raukaan sergeant and directed his armour’s systems to harvesting Sevastian’s data scraps, setting his cogitator to running them through a series of decryption algorithms. Maybe it was the unexpected simulus training that Kristos had subjected him to, or maybe it was the effect of Stronos’ innate curiosity, but he wanted to know what Kristos and Sevastian had to discuss that was not for Fabris’ or Alfaran’s ears.
A column of red runes racked up along his right optic display. Jalenghaal scowled inwardly. Kristos’ cryptographic lore was too great. He would need to transmit for days for Jalenghaal’s systems to even have a calculable chance of cracking it.
Fabris lubricated his malfunctioning tongue with a long pull of wine.
‘I am sure the Iron Hands are more than willing to coordinate their efforts to best effect,’ suggested Magos Qarismi.
‘I–’
The shudder of an advancing Knight cut Fabris short, the silhouette of something deep maroon and festooned in gold passing through the curtaining rain and into the arena.
VII
The klaxon warbled through the hanging murk and a great cry filled the storehouse. Even arising from a thousand human throats, it was a long way short of human. Rauth felt it enter him, through the pores of his skin, under his fingernails. He breathed it in and felt it swell his lungs. It beat under his breast the way his heart didn’t. He clenched his fists at his sides, the servos in his bionic left squealing. He looked up slowly, struggling to control his rage.
