The Voice of Mars

by David Guymer

  ‘I will go alone,’ he said. This was something he had to do. He could defer it to no other. Not Thecian, not Barras, not Yolanis or her pet Harlequin. It had to be him. Prideful, he knew, but pride had ever been the first flaw of the Iron Hands, and the last. Perhaps it was time to stop fighting it and embrace it. ‘What can I expect to find in there?’

  Yolanis opened her mouth to answer, then let the air out in a breath. She looked to Fall, who cocked her head, noncommittal. ‘I have no idea.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘This, I do not think, can be explained.’

  – Logi-Legatus Nicco Palpus

  I

  They took Lydriik’s Rhino. Ruination was an awesome machine, but too slow, and incapable of travelling that kind of distance ­unnoticed. And Lydriik was still hoping to locate the technology and report to Harsid before Nicco Palpus even realised he was no longer in Meduson.

  The Rhino had bumped off the Felgarrthi Mountains several hours ago, heading steadily north-east, and onto a featureless expanse of duricrust known as the Ralgus Verge. Lydriik did not know who Ralgus was, if the feature was even named for a person at all. The servitor driver dully repeated Chaplaincy cants as Verrox fed it data. The Iron Father was continuing to work on obtaining coordinates from the file descriptors, occasionally tossing insoluble scraps of data gristle to the brooding hulk sat on the metal bench opposite. The giant never spoke, but he seemed to have a mind like a cogitator; whatever tangled complexity the Iron Father threw his way, it emerged as clean binaric a few seconds later.

  ‘They are for more than just guarding the Iron Council,’ said Verrox, noticing Lydriik’s interest.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why they never speak?’ said Lydriik, suppressing a shudder.

  ‘Perhaps they have nothing to say.’

  For a moment Lydriik was sure that the Helfather turned to look at him, lenses dark as a window at night, soul empty, but he convinced himself that it was just the Rhino going over the rough terrain. He turned to look out of the tiny viewing portal behind his bench.

  There was not much to see: rocky black hardpan and the occasional swirl of dust. The Verge was seldom frequented. There were no exploitable resources here, and little by way of salvage. It was the abode of the hunted, the destitute and the desperate. An Iron Hands armoured carrier had little to fear from the banditry of the clanless. The land on its eastern borders on the other hand…

  ‘We have something,’ said Verrox, holding his data-slate to his face in a great sledgehammer of a fist.

  Lydriik watched at the portal.

  He already had a sense of foreboding about where they were going.

  >>> INFORMATIONAL >> THE MEDUSAN SHADOWLANDS

  The Shadowlands, sometimes known as the Land of Shadow, is a place of dark myth and fearful legend, wholly in keeping with Medusan superstition and the Iron Hands’ treatment of the deep phobias they all share and cannot acknowledge. Few enter. Those that do tend to be Endurist pilgrims or Mechanicus Explorator missions, for even amongst the Iron Council the fear of the Shadow­lands pervades. It is a place of forgotten temples and metallic relics, a land where the dead are believed to linger and where rogue intelligences lie dormant, where living machines of malign and inhuman intellect await the extinction of man and the rise of their kith. It is, of course, also the land where the primarch Ferrus Manus fought his most famous battle, against the silver wyrm Asirnoth. It pains me to iterate the obvious, but the theorem [CYCLICALLY REVIVED BY EACH NEW GENERATION OF SAVANTS] that the origin myths of the Canticle of Travels provide convergent evidence to the existence of machine sentiences and creatures of living metal is pure fantasy.

  The region is vast and intrinsically unmappable, and so long as orbital surveyance remains an impossibility, then logic must remain subservient to legend.

  Use this to your advantage.

  II

  They disembarked close to the Iron Father’s coordinates. Lydriik went first, bolt pistol pointed into the gusting storm, helmet auspex frazzled by static. His force axe burned in his other hand like a brazier in a storm gale, held low at his side, the wedge-shaped blade haloed by white light and buzzing grit. The vague shape of a pyramid loomed out of the storm before them, half buried in black sand. A faintly greenish emanation leached into the wind.

  ‘The legends are true,’ Lydriik breathed.

  ‘Nothing on auspex,’ Verrox voxed back, helmet to helmet. He was still on the Rhino’s troop ramp, a few metres behind, and looking up at the pyramid. ‘This place is deserted.’

  The Iron Father’s Tactical Dreadnought systems were more powerful than Lydriik’s Mk VIII, but some instinct made Lydriik throw up a hand for Verrox to wait.

  ‘Come no closer, Iron Hand.’

  The voice was snatched up by the wind and flung at Lydriik in pieces, making it impossible to identify its source by sound. Lydriik saw it instead: twenty-three candle-bright souls, about fifty metres ahead, half as many again dug into foxholes in the dunes above. The voice had come from the first group.

  The storm gave up a dozen human shapes, and for a second Lydriik was reminded of the living dead that roamed the Shadowlands, but he assured himself that the undead would likely not possess mortal souls. They ran towards him and Verrox, fanning out. The majority appeared to be women, hard of body, clad in synthskin bodygloves, faces goggled and bulging with rebreather gear. Two by two they dropped to one knee in the sand and took aim. Each one carried a hellgun, hooked up via high-capacity cables to the hotshot pack on their backs. Lydriik noted as well the assortment of swords and knives sheathed about their bodies. Their spirits were hard, bright and bitterly righteous.

  He had felt its like before, when he had served alongside Captain Harsid.

  ‘My name is Lydriik, Epistolary of the Borrgos Clan.’ He lowered his pistol, and held his force axe low where it was. ‘I was once a companion to one of your sisters – Laana Valorrn.’ He felt the softening of their attitudes, although none of the cultists physically altered their posture.

  ‘Then why is she not here?’ the voice called back.

  ‘The last I heard she was heading to a Knight world called Fabris Callivant. It is far from Medusa.’

  ‘Then why are you not there?’

  ‘I am an Iron Hand.’ Lydriik moved his axe up to lighten the deep nightshade-blue of his armour and the silver hand on his pauldron. ‘It was time for me to return home.’

  ‘You know these people?’ Verrox growled in his ear, his breath reeking of motor oil.

  ‘Death Cult, sworn to the spirit of the primarch,’ Lydriik whispered back. ‘I have fought alongside one of their number before.’

  The Iron Father squinted up to the uncertain smudge of the pyra­mid ahead, a strange hunger reshaping his face. ‘The Enduring Legion. There have always been rumours…’

  There was a crunch of sand and another bodygloved woman walked through the waiting assassins. She stopped well back from Lydriik, her hellgun and bayonet pointed into the ground.

  ‘If you were with our sister, if you knew of us and what she fought for, then why have you come?’

  ‘Laana understood that the xenotech had the power to break the Iron Hands of our reliance on flesh, to sever our link to the primarch.’­ Several of the cultists muttered and cursed. Lydriik waited for them before continuing. ‘She never told me that a component of it was already here.’

  ‘She has hunted alongside the alien for many years. This part was given into our keeping only recently, but it is our privilege to guard it, to preserve the integrity of the primarch.’

  ‘Strength eternal,’ some of the women muttered.

  Lydriik frowned towards them, their guns unwavering.

  Why would Kristos and Yeldrian both turn to the same group to assist them in tracking down the Dawnbreak Technology? There was more going on here than Lydriik was seeing.

&n
bsp; Verrox laid a mammoth gauntlet on Lydriik’s shoulder plate, then moved to stand in front of him. Twelve hellguns clattered up. ‘I am Verrox, of the Iron Council. And my passage will not be denied.’

  One of the cultists suddenly shifted her aim up to cover something large that had just rattled the Rhino’s embarkation ramp. Lydriik did not need to see the look on the masked woman’s face to realise that the Helfather had just exited the Rhino.

  He made a show of holstering his pistol.

  ‘We are not here to fight.’

  ‘We were told that there were Iron Hands that might come looking for it.’ The woman glared suspiciously at Verrox. ‘Even from amongst the Iron Council.’ She turned thoughtfully to Lydriik. ‘You say you knew Laana.’

  ‘As well as she would let me,’ said Lydriik, a rueful smile that the woman would not be able to see spreading across his face at the memory. ‘She… unnerved me, just a little.’

  The assassin gave a snort, which her sisters took as a signal to lower their weapons. ‘You really did know her.’ She waved to her sisters, some kind of gestural language with a root in Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. It was dissimilar enough to confound Lydriik’s attempts to eavesdrop. ‘My name is Sara. Sara Valorrn.’

  III

  Their boots scuffed on the dark metal flags, Lydriik’s like a chisel on a diorite sculpture, Verrox’s heavy and careless, more like a sledgehammer, the noise echoing out through the long hall. Tall, glass-sided cabinets dotted the space, lit from within, like columns of light reaching down to an ocean trench. They held what looked like relics, torn scraps of parchment, a scorched piece of armour, a bit of glove. Pedestals of finely carved basalt stood in watery pools of ultraviolet. Somewhere a fountain gurgled. It had the air of a library. Or a shrine. Lydriik turned on the spot, looking, a sense of wonderment he could not quite explain rising inside him. Verrox looked like a dog commanded to sit, and Lydriik knew that the Iron Father would be aching to be loose amongst these relics.

  Sara threw off a string of gestures, her sisters dropping back to take up unobtrusive positions about the hall. Lydriik noted that they kept their hellguns charged and primed. Then the assassin pulled off her mask and goggles, scratching ruefully at the synthskin rash over her shaved head.

  The resemblance to Laana was striking. Sharp lines, hard angles, ash-pale, eyes that could somehow look upon a Space Marine in his glory and express disillusionment, as if she had been raised on legends and the truth of them fell short.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘The Superior will decide if you are to be trusted or not.’

  Lydriik did not ask what the outcome would be if it was decided that they could not. He glanced to Verrox, who nodded, understanding, gesturing in turn to the Helfather who stood beside him, patient as an alien monolith in the sand.

  Sara’s footsteps squeaked and echoed as they receded down the hall.

  Lydriik was tempted to suggest simply leaving, now, while the assassin was absent. His objective had been to locate the Dawnbreak Technology, not to secure it or to retrieve it, and he was satisfied that that mission had been fulfilled. The logical course was to return to the Telesterax with all haste, expropriate the use of an astropath and direct a message to Fabris Callivant for Yeldrian’s witch to intercept.

  But Verrox spoke first.

  ‘An Endurist fane,’ he breathed. ‘There were legends, but no one ever ventures into the Shadowlands. It is said they founded their temple here shortly after the Dropsite Massacre. Before the first ships and messages could have reached them, some say, forewarned by a visitation of the primarch’s own undying spirit.’ He looked slowly over the interred relics. ‘They gather his possessions and await his resurrection.’

  ‘I know the myth,’ said Lydriik.

  The Endurist belief also had a minority following within the echelons of the Chapter, and Lydriik was well aware that Verrox was its most prominent adherent. The Chaplaincy generally turned a blind eye, seeing factionalism in all its forms as firmly in keeping with the competitive doctrine of the primarch’s recorded values. Provided the truth of Ferrus’ fallibility and death remained sacrosanct, almost anything else remained open to challenge.

  Verrox moved towards the nearest cabinet. It held a single fragment of armour, the back part of a rerebrace, shaped to fit over a warrior’s tricep. It was mangled by battle damage, aged beyond recognition, but even at a glimpse it was plainly too large to have ever fitted the arm of a standard Legiones Astartes warrior. It was not significantly smaller than the slabbed cuisse that plated the Iron Father’s thighs.

  ‘Is this his?’ Verrox wondered aloud. His gauntlet thudded gently on the glass, his face pressing alongside it. No mist clouded the glass. The Iron Father’s breath was cold.

  Lydriik shrugged and said nothing. He knew that it was wiser simply to wait, as the assassin had asked, but he could not deny his own kernel of curiosity.

  He came to a plinth.

  The angular lump of basalt was a little too low for him, the round lip engraved with beasts and dragons and men in armour bearing longrifles and hunting lances. On it rested an open tome, an ivory reading wand set on the polished black stone beside it. Curiosity at last winning him over, Lydriik leaned in for a closer inspection.

  The text was ancient Medusan. The chirography was brief and efficient, simple illuminations decorating the marginalia. There were only a handful of shades that could be ground from Medusa’s dark rocks, and Lydriik recognised the blacks and greys from his studies of the ironglazier’s craft. All were native. The pages were brittle and greyed with age.

  He looked around, but the watching cultists seemed indifferent to his interest. Verrox had already wandered to another cabinet.

  Sliding his gauntlet fingers under the binding, Lydriik carefully closed the book for a look at its cover.

  The binding was some kind of dark reptilian leather, weather proofed with a thin layer of ironglass that had preserved the mat­erial even as the pages inside had mottled and dried. An image had been etched into the underside of the glass, the colour and texture of the underlying leather exploited by the glass with a skill at which Lydriik, no stranger to the art, could only marvel. It depicted a warrior in old Medusan plate steel. Such armours, forged from native materials of awesome scarcity, were the preserve of warlords and kings, and had been quickly discarded to history in favour of the armaplas and plasteel that came with the planet’s rediscovery by Mars. Even without much to reference a sense of scale the figure was a giant. His musculature was fantastic, his shoulders broad, his eyes hard, pressed with pigment to look like bolts of silver. His immense arms were wrapped around the coils of a gigantic wyrm, its head snarling behind the hero’s shoulder.

  Lydriik stilled as he realised who the figures were.

  Ferrus Manus. Asirnoth.

  The book was the Canticle of Travels.

  His fingers tingled as they ran over the ironglass sheath. The oldest known Canticle text was dated to the early centuries of M33, compiled from oral stories by a visiting magos anthropologicae who never put his name to the compendium. Lydriik had given one such priceless tome to Kardan Stronos as a gift, something by which to remember their long discussions of philosophy when he had departed to become Prime Librarian to Clan Borrgos. This book plainly predated M33. The runescript, the materials, the pigment­ation, all were native to pre-Imperial Medusa.

  And it was clearly not oral.

  With a creak of stiffened parchment, he opened the book to a random page and picked up the ivory reading wand.

  …and taking advantage of the beast’s distraction, Ferrus Manus did approach the Chimerae with spear in hand, and…

  Lydriik blinked, as if the book might have been switched without his noticing. He read on for a few more lines. He set the wand down.

  Taking hold of the plinth, he drew a deep breath.

  That was not how the s
tory of the Chimerae went, the way every Iron Hand had been compelled to read and memorise it for the last seven thousand years.

  He barely noticed the echoing squeak, until Sara had returned the length of the hall. Another figure followed serenely after her, draped in red and gold. The Superior. Lydriik felt his heart sink.

  Kristos and Yeldrian had not propositioned the same cult after all. Kristos had had nothing to do with it.

  It was Nicco Palpus.

  ‘You,’ Lydriik breathed. ‘Did Yeldrian know?’

  Nicco Palpus looked amused by the question. ‘I doubt it. For a species so adept at manipulation, they possess a curious blind spot for it when the tables are turned.’ He spread his hands. ‘But then, can something similar not be said of us all?’

  ‘Who is Yeldrian?’ said Verrox.

  ‘It does not matter now,’ said Lydriik. ‘What is going on here, Palpus?’

  ‘I was going to ask you something similar, but the answers are all superfluous now.’ The logi-legatus’ attention glanced at Lydriik, passing to the opened Canticle on the pedestal beside him. ‘You are dogged, Epistolary, I will grant you that much. The Dawnbreak Technology, I could have explained. My interest in keeping it here, I could have explained. I would have, if I had to. But this? No.’ The logi-legatus frowned, and to Lydriik he appeared genuinely saddened. ‘This I do not think can be explained.’

  ‘I will know what you are talking about,’ Verrox grumbled at Lydriik.

  Lydriik pointed at the book. His arm was shaking. ‘That the Mechanicus has been rewriting Medusan doctrine for at least seven thousand years. I have fought alongside the Brazen Claws, and the Red Talons. I have argued with them over the proper interpret­ation of the stories.’ He thrust his quivering finger at Nicco Palpus and shouted. ‘And they were right! Throne have mercy on us all. They were right all along. They are the true inheritors of the primarch. Not us.’

  Palpus shrugged. ‘And?’