Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

‘Quick,’ repeated Raeven. ‘The Lord Generals and the Legions have called for a council of war and I’ll not start my governorship by having anyone doubting my competency.’

  Lyx shrugged and pulled a naga-fang filleting knife from the many concealed folds of her dress as she stood above the shrivelled wraith of her former husband and half-brother.

  ‘Shargali-Shi needs the blood of the firstborn,’ said Lyx, dropping to one knee and resting the blade against the side of Albard’s neck. ‘Not all of it, but a lot.’

  Albard spat in her face.

  ‘This may be quick,’ she said, wiping her face, ‘but I promise it will be agonising.’

  SEVEN

  The Nameless Fortress

  War council

  The gift

  Loken stepped onto the cold embarkation deck of the orbital fortress. Fixed a hundred kilometres above Titan’s surface and swathed in the darkness of its night-side, the bleak station spun gently above an active cryovolcano. Rassuah had flown the Tarnhelm onto its embarkation deck with a light hand at the controls, her every auspex warning that she was bracketed by lethal ordnance.

  Vapour rose from the void-cold flanks of the Tarnhelm, and Loken sweated in his armour. The deck was enormous, with space enough for great prison-barques to disgorge their human cargo and the custodians of the fortress to render them.

  A squad of mortal warriors in gloss-red armour and silver-visored helms awaited him at the base of the ramp, but Loken ignored them in favour of the broadly built veteran standing before them.

  Armoured identically to Loken, the warrior’s deeply tanned and deeper lined face were well known to him. White hair, kept close-cropped, and a neat beard of the same hue made him look old. Pale eyes that had seen too much were even older.

  ‘Loken,’ said Iacton Qruze, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘It’s good to see you, lad.’

  ‘Qruze,’ replied Loken, coming forward to take the old warrior’s hand. The grip was firm, unyielding, as if Qruze were afraid to let go. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘A place of forgetting,’ said Qruze.

  ‘A prison?’

  Qruze nodded, as though reluctant to expound on the grim purpose behind the nameless fortress.

  ‘An unkind place,’ said Loken, taking in the featureless walls and bleak, institutional grimness. ‘Not a place to which the ideals of the Imperium easily cling.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Qruze, ‘but only the young and naïve believe wars can be won without such places. And to my lasting regret, I am neither.’

  ‘None of us are, Iacton,’ said Loken. ‘But why do we find you here?’

  Qruze hesitated, and Loken saw his eyes dart in the direction of Tisiphone, the great double-edged sword harnessed across his back.

  ‘Did you bring them?’ asked Qruze.

  ‘All but one,’ answered Loken, curious as to why Qruze had ignored his question.

  ‘Who didn’t you get?’

  ‘Severian.’

  Qruze nodded. ‘He was always going to be the hardest to convince. Well, our mission just went from almost impossible to nigh suicidal.’

  ‘I think that’s the part he objected to.’

  ‘He always was a clever man,’ said Qruze.

  ‘You knew him?’ asked Loken, and instantly regretted it when he saw a distant look enter Qruze’s eyes.

  ‘I fought alongside the Twenty-Fifth Company on Dahinta,’ said Qruze.

  ‘The overseers,’ said Loken, remembering the hard fought campaigns to cleanse the derelict cities of scavenger machines.

  ‘Aye, it was Severian that got us past the circuit defences of the Silicate Palace to the inner precincts of the Archdroid,’ said Qruze. ‘He saved us months of grinding attrition. I remember when he first brought word of the–’

  Loken was well used to Iacton Qruze’s wandering reminiscences, but this was not the time to indulge his fondness for old Legion history.

  ‘We should be going,’ he said before Qruze could go any further.

  ‘Aye, you’re right, lad,’ agreed Qruze with a sigh. ‘The sooner I’m away from this damn place the better. Necessity is all well and good, but that doesn’t make what we do in its name any easier.’

  Loken turned to board the Tarnhelm, but Qruze made no move to follow him.

  ‘Iacton?’

  ‘This won’t be easy for you, Garviel,’ said Qruze.

  Instantly alert, Loken said, ‘What won’t?’

  ‘There’s someone here who needs to speak to you.’

  ‘To me? Who?’

  Qruze inclined his head towards the red-armoured gaolers, who snapped to attention in escort formation.

  ‘She asked for you by name, lad,’ said Qruze.

  ‘Who did?’ repeated Loken.

  ‘Best you see for yourself.’

  Of all the hells Loken had seen and imagined, few compared to the bleak desolation and hopelessness of this orbital prison. Every aspect of its design appeared calculated to crush the human spirit, from the grim institutional mundanity of its appearance to the oppressive gloom that offered no respite or any hope that its occupants would ever see open skies again.

  Qruze had boarded the Tarnhelm, leaving him in the custody of the fortress’s gaolers. They moved with precision and appeared to care little for the fact that he was a warrior of the Legions. To them, he was just another detail to be factored into their security protocols.

  They marched him through vaulted corridors of dark iron and echoing chambers that still bore faint traces of blood and faeces no amount of cleaning fluid could ever scrub away. The route was not direct, and several times Loken was sure they had doubled back over their course, following a twisting path deeper into the heart of the fortress.

  His escorting gaolers were trying to disorient him, make him lose any sense of which way they might have come or in which direction lay the exit. A tactic that might work on ordinary prisoners, already half-broken and desperate, but one that was wasted on a legionary with an eidetic sense of direction.

  As they marched down a winding screw-stair, Loken tried to imagine who could be incarcerated here that might have asked for him by name.

  It should have been easy; Qruze had said ‘she’, and he knew few females.

  Legion life was an overtly masculine environment, though the Imperium cared little for the sex of the soldiers that made up its armies, flew its starships and facilitated its operation. Most of the women he’d met were dead, so maybe this was someone who’d since learned of his existence. A sister or mother, or perhaps even the daughter of someone he’d once known.

  He heard distant screams and the soft echo of weeping. The sounds had no obvious source and Loken had the unsettling impression of years of misery so intense they had imprinted on the walls themselves.

  His guardians eventually led him to a barred chamber suspended over a vault of complete darkness. A number of passageways led from the chamber, each narrow enough for a mortal, but almost claustrophobic for a warrior of his stature. They moved along the rightmost corridor, and Loken detected the unmistakable stench of human flesh and ingrained filth and sweat. But most of all he smelled despair.

  His escort stopped at a cell secured by a heavy iron door marked with alphanumerics and what looked like some kind of lingua-technis. It meant nothing to him, as he suspected was the point. Everything about this place was designed to be unfamiliar and unwelcoming.

  A lock disengaged and the door rose into the frame with a clockwork ratcheting sound, though none of the guards had touched it. Remote contact with a centralised control room most likely. The guards stood aside and Loken didn’t waste any words on them, ducking beneath the lintel and stepping within.

  Almost no light penetrated the cell, only diffuse reflections from the corridor outside, but that was more than enough for Loken to make out the outline of a kneeling figure.

  Loken was no expert on the female form, but the figure’s loose robes gave little in its shape to distinguish it. A
head turned towards him at the sound of the door opening, and Loken saw something familiar in its faintly elongated occipital structure.

  A faint buzzing sound came from the high ceiling, and a humming florescent lumen disc sparked to life. It flickered for a few seconds before the freshly routed power stabilised.

  At first Loken thought this was a hallucination or another vision of someone long dead, but when she spoke, it was the voice he knew from the many hours they had spent in remembrance.

  He remembered her as being small, even though most mortals were small to him. Her skin had been so black he’d wondered if it had been dyed, but the sickly light of the lumen disk made it seem somehow grey.

  Her skull was hairless, made ovoid by cranial implants.

  She smiled, the expression faltering and unfamiliar. Loken guessed it had been a long time since she had need of those particular muscles.

  ‘Hello, Captain Loken,’ said Mersadie Oliton.

  Hacked from the rock of the mountains long before the I Legion built the Citadel of Dawn, the Hall of Flames was a raked amphitheatre of rulership. In the long centuries since then, a vault had had been built around the amphitheatre, a fortress around the vault and a city around the fortress.

  Much had changed on Molech since then, but the Hall retained much of its original purpose. The firstborn scions of House Devine were still ritually burned here and the planet’s rulers still made decisions affecting the lives of millions here. It was, however, no longer a place where mechanised warriors settled their honour duels with fights to the death.

  Right now, Raeven almost wished it was.

  A hail of stubber fire from Banelash would make short work of the squabbling representatives and silence their strident voices.

  As pleasant a fantasy as that was, Raeven took a deep breath and tried to pay attention to what was going on around him. Enthroned at the centre of the amphitheatre, Raeven held the bull-headed sceptre said to have been borne by the Stormlord himself. The artefact was certainly ancient, but that anything could have survived thousands of years without blemish seemed unlikely.

  He dragged his focus back to the five hundred men and women filling the tiered chamber; the senior military officers of Molech. Aides, scriveners, calculus logi, savants and ensigns surrounded them like acolytes, and Raeven was reminded of Shargali-Shi and his Serpent Cult devotees.

  Castor Alcade and three grim-faced Ultramarines sat on the stone benches at floor-level across from Vitus Salicar. He too was not alone, with a Blood Angel in red gold to his left, another in black to his right.

  Tyana Kourion, Lord General of the Grand Army of Molech, sat motionless in the centre of the next tier in her dress greens, stoic and grim. Colonels from a dozen regiments gathered around her like moths drawn to a beneficent flame. Raeven didn’t know them, but recognised Kourion’s immediate subordinates.

  The heads of the four operational theatres were each seated beneath the sigil denoting one of the cardinal compass points.

  Clad in her signature drakescale burnoose and golden eye-mask was Marshal Edoraki Hakon of the Northern Oceanic, and sat along from her was Colonel Oskur von Valkenberg of the Western Marches, whose uniform looked as though he’d slept in it for a month. Commander Abdi Kheda of the Kushite Eastings wore full body armour as though she expected to fight her way back through the jungles to her posting, and finally the Khan of the Southern Steppe, Corwen Malbek, sat cross-legged with a longsword and rifle balanced across his knees.

  Behind the four commanders sat hundreds of colonels, majors and captains of the various regiments of the Imperial Army, each clad in their battledress armour. The sheer variety of uniforms had the effect of making the gathered soldiery look like revellers in a gaudy carnival. Until now, Raeven hadn’t quite grasped just how many regiments were garrisoned on Molech.

  His mother and Lyx were in the great gallery above, already in bitter disagreement over the course he should take.

  Lyx spoke of the vision she’d had the night of Raeven’s Becoming, of how his actions would decide the course of a great war fought on Molech.

  Both claimed the power of foresight, but neither could say with any certainty what those actions would be or in whose favour he would turn the war. Was he to align with Horus, and in so doing be granted dominion of the systems around Molech? Or was it his destiny to fight the Warmaster and win glory and repute in his defeat? Both roads offered hope of fulfilling his sister’s prophetic vision, but which to choose?

  In addition to the ground forces, Molech boasted a sizeable naval presence, with a fleet of over sixty vessels, including eight capital ships and numerous frigates less than a hundred years old. Lord Admiral Brython Semper appeared to be asleep, though such a feat was surely impossible in so noisy an environment. Uniformed ratings took notes for him, but Raeven suspected Semper would never read them. He had no interest in ground-pounding warfare. If the Warmaster’s forces reached Molech’s surface, he would already be lost to the void.

  Seated apart from the branches of conventional warriors were the Mechanicum contingents, brooding figures swathed in a mix of reds and blacks who each kept to their own little enclaves. Raeven knew more than most of the Mechanicum, but even that was rumour and second-hand gossip culled from his spies among the Sacristans.

  In the position of prime importance stood the Mechanicum being designated Bellona Modwen of the Ordo Reductor. The senior Martian Adept was fully encased in gloss-green cybernetic body armour that made her look like a seated sarcophagus. The sinister mech-warrior cohorts of Thallax were hers to command, as was a fearsome array of war machines, tanks and unknowable technologies locked in the catacombs of Mount Torger.

  Her magi trained the Sacristans and kept the Knights functional. As such, the Martian Priesthood was a substantial power bloc on Molech and had the right to attend every military conclave, though they seldom exercised that right.

  The Mechanicum and the fleet might be keeping their own counsel, but the junior officers of the Army were making up for their absent voices. They loudly hectored the speakers below them, either in complete agreement or to drown out what they saw as rank stupidity.

  Raeven couldn’t decide which.

  Current Right of Voice belonged to the Warmonger of Legio Fortidus; an amazonian looking woman in an oil-stained khaki bodyglove named Ur-Nammu. In heavily accented Gothic, she set out the position of her Legio, which, to Raeven’s ears ran thusly.

  Princeps Uta-Dagon and Utu-Lerna would not endorse any plan that didn’t involve charging the Titans of Legio Fortidus straight at the enemy the instant they landed.

  Opinicus, the Invocatio of Legio Gryphonicus, held the view that just because the rest of Legio Fortidus had been wiped out on Mars was no reason for the rest of them to throw themselves on the swords of self-sacrifice.

  As Raeven understood it, both Ur-Nammu and Opinicus undertook roughly the same role within their Legios, a form of ambassador between the inhuman Titan princeps and those they must perforce fight alongside.

  Their bickering was pointless, for Carthal Ashur, the cruelly handsome Calator Martialis of Legio Crucius had yet to speak. The lesser ambassadors would eventually defer to him, for the largest Titan on Molech was a Crucius engine, the ancient colossus known as Paragon of Terra. Ashur carried the authority of the Princeps Magnus, Etana Kalonice, and if she had been roused from her war-dreams beneath Iron Fist Mountain, then the smaller Legios would undoubtedly fall into line behind her.

  The ambassadors of the Legios eventually finished speaking and deliberations moved onto logistical matters: the establishment of supply lines, ordnance depots and stockpiling. Raeven’s threshold for boredom – already stretched thin by the hours of debate – was pushed to breaking point by long recitations of supply levels. A dozen aexactor clerks had already spoken, and dozens more stood in line to be heard.

  Raeven rose from his throne and hammered the sceptre on the stone floor of the hall, eliciting fearful gasps from the reliquary keepers. H
e drew his pistol and aimed it at the nearest scrivener and his parchment-spewing data-slate.

  ‘You. Shut up. Right now,’ he said, his drawing of the weapon cutting through the droning account of lasrifle power-cell shortages at the Kushite Preceptory Line. ‘All of you listen very carefully to what I’m about to say. I will shoot the next scribe who dares to read an inventory list or stock level. Right through the head.’

  The clerks lowered their data-slates and shuffled uncomfortably in place.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Raeven. ‘Right, will someone tell me something of actual bloody importance. Please.’

  Castor Alcade of the Ultramarines stood and said, ‘What sort of thing are you looking to hear, Lord Devine? This is how wars are fought, with properly emplaced lines of supply and a fully functioning infrastructure in place to support the front-line forces. If you want to hold this world against the Warmaster, then these are the things you need to know.’

  ‘No,’ said Raeven. ‘They’re the things you need to know. All I need to know is where I will ride into battle. I have an army of scriveners, quartermasters and savants to deal with numbers and lists.’

  ‘The Five Hundred Worlds are burning,’ snapped Alcade, ‘yet my Ultramarines stand ready to fight and die for a world not their own. Speak like that again, and I’ll take every warrior back to Ultramar.’

  ‘The Emperor Himself tasked your Legion and the Blood Angels with the defence of Molech,’ said Raeven with a mocking smile. ‘You would forsake that duty? I don’t think so.’

  ‘You would be wise not to test that theory,’ warned Alcade.

  ‘I am the rightful ruler of Molech,’ snapped Raeven. ‘Military command of this world falls to me, and if I learned anything from my father, may he rest in peace, it’s that a ruler needs to surround himself with the best people he can, delegate authority and then not interfere.’

  ‘An Imperial commander can delegate authority,’ said Alcade, ‘but never responsibility.’

  Raeven struggled to control his anger, feeling it twist in his chest like a poisoned blade.

  ‘My House has ruled Molech for generations,’ he said with cold hostility. ‘I know the meaning of responsibility.’