Heralds of the Siege

by Nick Kyme

  ‘End this now,’ says a voice. It comes in over Chapter-level vox. It carries a captain’s signum. Captain Thane. Kolo knows him only by name, but he is duty bound to obey him.

  Benedict switches from voxmitter to suit-to-suit vox. He says one word.

  ‘Fire.’

  The Imperial Fists do not hesitate. Their fingers squeeze triggers. The crackle of rocket ignition sounds from every gun, followed by the raucous, belching explosions of bolt-rounds.

  The effect of a bolt-round on unarmoured bodies is ugly. The rioters go from contained packages of life, neatly wrapped in clothes and skin, to a red mess. The demagogue dies with his anger frothing from his lips. The people at the edges of the crowd come to their senses and flee. Those at the centre are too far gone to relent immediately, but by the time Kolo’s fourth round takes a life, they are running. All of them are running. The resulting stampede kills hundreds, crushing bodies underfoot, or squeezing the breath out of them against the unyielding walls of the container stacks as they push to squeeze through narrow gaps. They scream as they run blindly into one another, knocking each other down, bouncing off obstacles. They turn on each other in their desperation to get away. The young and the old fare the worst.

  The Imperial Fists fire only as many times as strictly necessary. Four shots apiece.

  ‘Cease firing,’ said Benedict emotionlessly.

  Thane stares grimly at the pict units. Drones sweep over the square, providing him multiple angles to examine the Legion’s handiwork.

  The dead litter an area one hundred and eighty metres across by forty-five deep. The centre is an abattoir scene where not one body remains intact. At the edges the bodies are whole, asphyxiated mostly, lying down like they are playing a childish game. They are in the same orientation, heads away from the massacre. They are like the petals of a flower around a red corolla, or iron filings displaying the delicate lines of force around a magnet. He estimates over a thousand dead. The action, stampede and aftermath lasted less than six minutes.

  The Imperial Fists have returned to the statue stillness. Their guns are smoking. Blood drips from yellow battleplate. The paving before the distribution centre is awash with gore. It gathers thickly in the messages of peace and hope engraved into the flagstones. Fyceline wisps drift over the slaughter, merging with the steam rising from opened bodies. The screams of the crowd recede as they run, terrified, from their protectors.

  ‘What are we doing?’ says Guntren.

  ‘Keeping the peace before the fight,’ says Thane.

  ‘Was it truly necessary?’ says Guntren.

  ‘Yes,’ says Thane. He turns away from the screens. ‘Find me the official responsible for this travesty,’ he orders his company vox-master. ‘If there is no food for the civilians,’ he says to his logister, ‘see what the Legion can spare. I want contingencies formulating to prevent this happening again.’

  Guntren gives him an angry stare. ‘Blood cannot be soaked up by bread,’ he says.

  Thane does not reply.

  It is quiet in the square now.

  And still the enemy do not come.

  MAGISTERIUM

  Chris Wraigh

  Samonas had survived.

  The bald fact meant almost nothing to him. Preservation of his own life, for its own sake, had never been something he had cared about. The very idea was a kind of blasphemy – one of the few he still believed in.

  By the same token, he was not self-indulgent enough to wish that he had perished alongside his brothers of the Ten Thousand. That would have been an equal, if an opposite, error, for grief was as alien an emotion to him as pride. And yet, the event itself, the catastrophe, could not be ignored. It hung like an iron chain around the shoulders of all those who had come back. Physical wounds could heal, and most would do so quickly, but this weight was not a physical thing. None spoke the word ‘failure’, but still it could be half heard in the echoing silences of the Tower of Hegemon, detected in every whisper of faded crimson fabric on cold stone, seen in every deflected look.

  Samonas walked down the long gallery. The suspensor lumens in the tower were turned down. That reflected the mood – the innards of the place were almost empty now, and already growing musty from stagnant air.

  Nine out of every ten. Nine out of every ten. At first he had not believed it, even after witnessing the scale of the slaughter at close quarters. No one had. Only once the portal was truly sealed and the foundations of the Palace secured, only once the last ragged lines of survivors had limped back to the arming chambers, their cloaks rent and their blades broken, did it start to seem possible.

  Those who had gained the gate waited for many days in the tower afterwards, hoping more would somehow follow them out, but the deep paths had been closed by the Emperor Himself and could not be opened again. Any souls that had been sent into that impossible realm to contest the approach of Unreality and had not yet returned were lost there.

  Nine out of every ten. The loss was barely conceivable. Every Custodian was a unique and priceless creation, a masterpiece of genecraft curated over many decades, sometimes centuries. Before the current conflict had come, the numbers lost in combat had never risen above a handful in any single engagement. A belief in their near invincibility had taken root, both within and outside the order. Strength begat strength – the Legio Custodes did not shy away from its reputation, but instead cultivated the most ostentatious displays of dominance. Their armour became more ornate, decorated in exponentially more complex designs and insignias. Confidence, bordering – some said – on arrogance, had never been in short supply.

  Samonas drew closer to a pair of large doors. He did not know how his master would be. For the first time in the many long years since he had begun to serve him, Samonas found him hard to predict. It had been a sobering discovery, realising that even he was subject to the cold hand of doubt, to the slow poison of uncertainty – beforehand, that had not been obvious.

  But there was no time for hesitation. All knew that the Warmaster was approaching now, cleaving an accelerating path towards the world of his birth. What was left was left; those who could still stand and hold a sword were required to find the strength to do so again.

  At his approach, a gold-masked tower guardian opened the doors, and twin brass plates swung inwards across a bare stone floor.

  Twenty figures stood in the chamber on the far side. Fourteen were baseline human counsellors and adjutants of the tower, variously armoured and cloaked in fabrics of antiquity. Five were, like Samonas, members of the order proper – Custodians of the Legion, calm giants of destruction, their helms removed to expose wound-puckered faces. Among them was Diocletian, who would surely be announced tribune soon, one of the last to withdraw from the great subterranean defeat. That one carried many injuries, some of them physical.

  The twentieth, Constantin Valdor, Samonas’ master, towered over them all. His head was unhelmed, exposing a slim, dour face. His scalp was shaved to the skin, marked by a filigree of scars. Little trace of age lingered on his features, even though he had lived for a very long time. When he spoke, his voice was hard-edged but held low. Even for one of the Legio, even when set against the peerless adepts of that place, the command exercised over his body was astonishing and worthy of study – he would resemble a graven image one moment, utterly still, every facial muscle held in perfect stasis, before action demanded a response, and then the liquidity of movement was so abrupt as to scrape against the limits of physical law.

  But even his fine armour was damaged. The many carved eyes and sigils and signs were scratched out, as if by a cat’s claws. In places, the gold of his battleplate was burned black-orange. His cloak was tattered, long strips of frayed fabric hanging from battered shoulders.

  ‘Can nothing be done?’ Valdor asked.

  One of the assembled officials, a green-robed woman named Alei Nai-Borsch who bore the mark of the tower’s principal forge, bowed her shaved head in apology.

  ‘I have d
emanded more from the Martian delegation, who are the only ones with the power to emend this,’ she said. ‘There are limits to our prestige with them at this time. They lost a great deal, too.’

  Valdor nodded. ‘How many are required?’

  ‘Seven, captain-general. By nightfall, dependent on the labours of the Apothecaries, perhaps eight.’

  Samonas immediately understood what was being discussed. Dreadnought shells. For centuries the requirement for such things had been light, and only a handful had existed within the frigid depths of the tower’s mausoleum. Now, demand for the hallowed sarcophagi was acute. In normal times, the process of interment would have been extended for months, enough time to painstakingly prepare the purpose-built individual walker-units for the unique mind-impulse lattices of the recipient. These were not normal times, though, and assistance was urgently required.

  ‘I shall speak to them,’ said Valdor. ‘What did they want in return?’

  ‘That was the thing,’ said Nai-Borsch. ‘Nothing that I could ascertain. There was… I do not know. But I thought I detected something like… shame.’

  Valdor’s expression never flickered. ‘As well there might be.’ He turned to another official, Kain Noi-Hailas, the master armourer. ‘The returned fighters who still stand,’ he said. ‘You have seven days. Every blade, every armour plate, every spear.’

  Samonas guessed that the timetable was impossible. The equipment of the Legio had been mutilated at an even faster rate than its warriors. In the final hours of the subterranean defeat, many Custodians had fought empty-handed, taking on enemies beyond imagination with clenched fists and broken spear-staves. Samonas had been one of them, wielding his extinguished sentinel blade against creatures of unbound terror. By the end, the metal had been boiled away into a foul reek of smoke, leaving him only the shards at the hilt to stab with. He still remembered the eyes, glaring at him through a haze of alien spoil, like reptiles’ eyes, yellow and slitted, confident, infinitely malignant, and winning.

  Noi-Hailas merely bowed. Like all of them, he had been working for weeks with only snatched hours of sleep between punishing work-details. He was not posthuman in the way that Diocletian and Samonas were, and the exertion would likely kill him if not halted soon. And it would not halt soon.

  ‘By your will, captain-general,’ he said.

  Only then did Valdor turn to Samonas. ‘You bring me welcome news, I trust, vestarios.’

  That was an archaic title, one that meant little other than a vague conferral of seniority. Samonas had been at the side of the captain-general for over a hundred years now, and that carried more weight than any dusty term of the Lex.

  ‘The Lord Dorn is ready to receive you,’ Samonas said. ‘Is that welcome or unwelcome?’

  Valdor did not smile.

  ‘Another primarch,’ he murmured. Then his expression lifted – forcefully, perhaps. ‘Very good,’ he said to the others. ‘Continue as you have been doing. The protection of Him on the Throne be with you.’

  The others bowed, then withdrew to pursue the tasks Valdor had given them.

  ‘What was his mood?’ Valdor asked Samonas, turning and walking with his vestarios back towards the great double doors.

  ‘The war takes its toll on us all,’ said Samonas evenly.

  Valdor snorted. ‘Difficult, then. I shall watch my tongue.’

  ‘The time for watching tongues may have passed some time ago.’

  ‘You are an insolent servant, Samonas.’

  ‘We teeter on the edge of annihilation, lord,’ said Samonas, bowing in apology. ‘A breeding ground for insolence.’

  The two of them passed back into the tower’s broad passageways, bored deep within ancient foundations. The captain-general’s gait was languid, almost totally silent despite his bulk.

  ‘This may be our last war together,’ Valdor said dryly. ‘Maintain the formalities, please.’

  Those who did not know the captain-general assumed that he possessed nothing in the way of mortal humours. That was not entirely true, although it had taken Samonas years of close acquaintance to appreciate them.

  ‘This will not be like it was before, lord,’ Samonas said.

  Valdor thought on that for a moment, never breaking stride. Ahead loomed great brass gates marked with the thunder-and-lightning emblem of the Legio.

  ‘Or it may very well be,’ the captain-general said. ‘All things repeat themselves. All lives are lived an endless number of times.’ He smiled thinly. ‘The trick is to welcome that. To wish to see it come again, just as it did in the past, now and for eternity.’

  Samonas was used to his master’s musings on philosophy. Like all his kind, the captain-general was as much scholar as warrior, though in the years since Prospero it was said that he had taken to his books more than before.

  ‘Then we will be fighting into infinity,’ Samonas said as the doors opened.

  ‘Do not regret that,’ said Valdor, passing through them. ‘One way or another, it was always our fate.’

  The glass panes blew out, scattering wildly across Tizca’s old streets in knee-deep piles. The shards were crimson now, refracting the blood of those who had won and lost the narrow ways into the central city. The skies above them roared, black like burning slicks of promethium. Red-hot winds raced down the blasted canyons of rubble, tearing at the lingering stone and throwing ash-clouds as high as the pyramids beyond. The earth underfoot vibrated, drumming as if hammered by great fists.

  A colonnade smashed, punched into debris by a tank barrage, and the fragile walls beyond it tottered. Samonas ducked down. He breathed heavily, gripping the hilt of his crackling sentinel blade. Far to the left, across a boiled-dry watercourse, he could see the tiny, dark-grey outlines of Wolves running into the maw of combat on another front, ducking and swerving to avoid a hail of oncoming las-fire.

  He watched them go, just for a second, admiring their bravado. There was something liberating about the Sons of Fenris in battle – a joy, a purity, a rawness. He had never expected to be impressed by them in that way, schooled as he had been in tales of their barbarism.

  He could feel his heart beating hard. Armour-thralls and Auxilia troops pushed up the shattered transitway on either side, hugging the piles of crystal detritus. Two Custodians of Samonas’ sodality loped at the head of the advance, going warily as they passed under the shadows of more burned-out buildings.

  He could feel the rumble of heavy armour grinding its way closer. Gunships braved the lightning-scarred skies over a background bellow of a planet in torment. Explosions went off with clockwork regularity, some far into the distance, many driven in close, all of them rocking the skeletal remains of the great pyramids looming still on the northern horizon.

  Samonas had fought many wars for the Legio, but nothing could have prepared him, or anyone else, for Prospero. This was battle conducted across every plane of sensory perception – reality itself rippling as the fury of two Legiones Astartes crashed into one another. The very air felt fractured, as if cracked by some unholy magic that made eyes burn and skin itch.

  He looked down, and only then saw where he had crouched – over the body of a Thousand Sons Space Marine, half buried in the rubble underfoot, his helm cracked open to reveal a mutilated face beneath. The sorcerer was dead, his breastplate cleaved by swinging cuts of a greatblade. Despite those terrible wounds, the Space Marine looked almost poised to re-emerge from his dusty tomb to take up the fight again.

  Samonas had killed many of them already. They did not die easily, those witches, and they were dangerous in turn, but their defiance was coming to an end now. The story’s details might differ, but the conclusion was always the same – the Legio would be victorious, just as it had been ever since taking up arms alongside the Master of Mankind. These were not the first sorcerers to be excised from existence under the banner of Unity, and they would not be the last.

  He got to his feet, joining the steady advance towards the end of the street. A Coronus gr
av-carrier thrummed past at close quarters, buoyed by a shimmer-haze that kicked and scattered the glass debris. A hundred Auxilia infantry brought up the rear, jogging through the glowing rubble and swinging las-sights.

  Proximity markers on Samonas’ false-image visual field drew closer, and he broke out into the intersection of two major thoroughfares. A long avenue of bombed-empty hab-units stretched along a straight axis, along which whole battalions of VI Legion armour were grinding north, wreathed in a fog of their own copious smoke. Muffled booms rang out from positions up ahead, a ranged bombardment of dug-in enemy lines.

  The Wolves were not the only ones there. Aquilon Terminators were forging a path up the debris-strewn central reservation, shepherded by scattered prowl-units of the Sisterhood. Valdor was among them, his long cloak whipping in the ash-blown wind. More than sixty Custodians of the Legio, plus hundreds of support troops and regular Auxilia units, were gathering for the push north.

  The captain-general looked almost untouched by combat. His armour was close to pristine, giving off a reflective aura under Prospero’s blackening skies. His Apollonian Spear seethed with energy, wrapping the golden shaft in a corona of false sunlight. He moved in the way he always did before battle – proud, confident, measured.

  Samonas bowed as he drew close.

  ‘Grim labour, vestarios,’ Valdor said.

  ‘Indeed, lord. Now that I see this place–’

  He had been intending to say that he wished to see it utterly destroyed – he had seen sorcery of a scale and depravity he had never witnessed before – but he never got the chance.

  The Land Raider juddered in close, gunmetal-grey and adorned with blood-red decorations of writhing serpents. It was the first of more than twenty such troop carriers, driven insanely fast through the rubble and kicking it up like a ship throws a bow wave.

  For a moment Samonas never even saw Leman Russ. He had certain expectations of primarchs – that they marched on foot at the head of their armies, issuing orders in clear voices like his own master. He did not expect them to ride into war, hanging off the back of a personnel transport one-handed and swinging a damned sword around like a baresark.