by Dan Abnett
‘What do you mean what’s going on?’
‘In the city? All that airshow? The damned horns?’
‘The First Legion has come to us,’ the officer replied proudly.
‘The First Legion, eh? The Lion’s mob? Big news.’
‘It is,’ the officer agreed.
‘Big news,’ Damon repeated, nodding. His heart sank. Too many serious players for comfort.
‘Ident,’ the officer reminded him.
Damon shrugged and nodded and held out his open, empty hand. It generally worked. The gesture was so automatic, guards usually saw what they wanted to see.
‘Good, all right,’ the officer said, waving him on.
Damon passed through the deep, cold shade of the Occident Gate on the back of the jolting servitor car and entered the western edge of the city. This was his target city, his bloody destiny, probably. It was not promising. Down at this skunk-end of the low-qual deme it was still gross, cheap-built habitas, tinker-marts and slum runs, and would be for many kilometres before a traveller could reach the handsome domi and wide estates of Xanthi Deme in the low, rolling country west of the river.
Damon dropped off the back of the trundling bulk-car and started walking down the busy highway, skirting Illyrian caravans and grain cargoes.
He suddenly had a bad feeling. He liked to call it his first sense because, according to his blessed mother, he had not been born with any.
‘Hey!’ a voice called out from behind him. ‘Hey, you! Fur coat man!’
Damon cursed. The gate officer had only been temporarily convinced. Damon took a look back, and saw a squad of praecentals moving from the gatehouse in his direction. They were picking up pace and shoving slower-moving pedestrians out of their path. Most of the locals shrank back. The praecentals looked like over-groomed show-guards, but they were tough, well-trained, and they carried serious authority.
They were also well-armed. Damon saw plasma weapons and intimidating blades.
‘Halt!’ one of them shouted. When Damon didn’t, the officer started barking at the pedestrian traffic.
‘Out of the way! Give us a clear shot!’
A clear shot? Encouraging. Welcoming. Reassuring. Times were worse, and tensions far hotter, than he had anticipated, and he had anticipated a fair bit.
It was a moment to switch out, to revert to the skills he’d honed hunting and being hunted over an unimaginably long period. The hindbrain temptation was huge. There were only a handful of humans in the galaxy possessed of equal to or greater experiential skill than Damon Prytanis. He’d met two of them, and one of those was his current target. The other was a surly, uncooperative rogue.
Yet another of his kind was the Emperor of Man. Damon had never met the fellow, and didn’t much want to. He sounded like a total dunkhole.
Smiling, he reverted.
Damon ducked to his left very sharply, racing down an alley into the warren of stenopoi, the maze of narrow streets in this most densely packed quarter of Laponis Deme. He collided with no one and knocked over nothing. People just got out of his way or, if they froze, he went around them. He made two more turns, another left and then a hard right, following a dank, high-walled lane under the arches of a major aqueduct. Washing had been strung out to dry on lines below the arch and between the walls, and he could smell cook-pots and pipe smoke.
The guards were fit, and close behind him, moving fast and with determination, despite the encumbrance of their armour and wargear.
He saw the hazy grey shapes of the giant granaries ahead of him, and thought for a moment that he might reach them and hide. But the praecentals were efficient. A second squad had appeared, crossing a chain-dropped canal bridge ahead of him to work back through the stenopoi and pin him between them and his pursuers.
He realised he was going to have to get wet. It disappointed him to have to contemplate blood-business so early on, but it also partly pleased him. He’d been in the mountains for too long, and he was cold and hungry and fit to hurt someone. He’d been sent to Macragge to perform a mission he didn’t want to perform, and challenge a man he didn’t think needed to be challenged.
Damon Prytanis was in an ugly mood, and by cornering him, the praecentals had offered him a chance to vent that frustration.
He carried four weapons. They had come with him in a sack of living flesh in order to survive, as metallic items, the extremity of the fast-jack teleport. The sack had been bred for purpose in a Khu’Nib replicator vat. Once he had cut it open and killed it to get at his weapons and kit, after his painful arrival, its meat had fed him for six days.
Four weapons: a matched brace of Zhul’kund murehk – elegant, long-snouted, knob-gripped sling pistols, the best kind. Eldar shuriken weapons were Damon’s favoured firearms, for what they lacked in range and accuracy they more than made up for in rate of fire and penetrative effect. This pair had come from Slau Dha’s personal battle-casket, an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity that had been made, Damon was sure, to emphasise the importance of the mission. One was called (in High Idharaen) Guh’hru, which meant ‘Bleed-to-death’, and the other was called (in the demotic and corrupted slang of the Crone Worlds) Meh’menitay, which meant ‘Death Looks in Your Eyes and Finds You Entirely Wanting’. He kept them holstered under his fur jacket, in a makeshift double-shoulder rig he’d made from the indigestible skin of the flesh-sack.
The third weapon was a short-pattern chainsword, not much longer than a gladius, which dated from the interminable wars of the pre-Unification Era of Terra, and which had been designed as a secondary, close-protection weapon for the retinues of a Panpacific nobleman called Kendra Huul. The sword came from Damon’s private collection, and he knew its provenance well, because he’d been the retinue member it had been carried by, and he had given it its name: Huul’s Doom. He wore it across his spine, once again under his heavy fur jacket.
The fourth weapon was a small red-glass bottle that lay in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat, jumbled in among the other odds and ends of his trade.
Damon side-stepped into a range of shadows, darted under the eaves of an old stable block, and pulled himself back against a stone partition wall to wait.
Six men coming from behind, six more from up ahead, Praecentals all. All of them were packing plasma weapons, and wielding quality blades if it got nasty-close, blades they knew how to handle. They were armoured in the head, torso, shoulders, groin and legs. Guilliman did not stint on the materiel budget for his householders, so that armour was plasteel at the very least, probably with a ceramite underveil.
Nothing a murehk couldn’t puncture, but he’d need to let them get very close to ensure hard, wet kills.
He reached under his coat and drew his pistols, Guh’hru in his right hand and Meh’menitay in his left. He held them up, muzzles aimed at the storm-streaked sky. With his thumbs, he stroked the studs that activated the almost silent gravitic accelerators and brought them cycling up to power. The wraithbone grips began to feel warm.
The sound of racing footfalls had ceased. Damon listened and heard, over the gurgle of the nearby canal and the distant street sounds, a terse, hushed back and forth: vox chirps, a search pattern inter-signalling as it spread out.
Come for me then, he willed them.
The first two appeared to his left very suddenly, turning around the end of the stable block with their plasma weapons aimed.
Snap. He was already moving. They had the drop, but he beat them to it. His guns came down, side-by-side, as he moved and fired.
He squeezed each trigger with the lightest of touches, a pulse technique that the eldar called the Ilyad’than, or ‘feather-finger’. Shuriken technology was amazing. The gravitic accelerators shoved shots out of the weapons at abnormal velocities, and ammunition was a solid core block of plasti-crystal that the gun sliced off and hurled one monomolecular disc at a time. It was
so efficient a system that a single over-generous squeeze of the trigger could unleash hundreds of razor-rounds in a second or two.
The Ilyad’than technique allowed the shooter to fire off crisp bursts of five or six discs at a time, preserving the solid ammunition core and avoiding messy overkill.
Damon was well-practised. Guh’hru spat four monomolecular discs through the armoured chest of one guard, and Meh’menitay did the same to the other. Dark slits, suddenly welling blood in extravagant quantity, appeared in their chest plating as they fell backwards. One dropped onto the path, the other toppled over a rail into the dirty canal.
Damon swung around as a third praecental appeared around the opposite end of the stable block behind him. Turning, he fired Guh’hru straight-armed, and put two discs into the man’s face, which ruptured messily inside the frame of his helmet. The man dropped to his knees, then flopped onto his front, kicking a squish of blood up out of his head on impact.
No pausing now. Voices were raised. The men had heard the distinctive shriek of sling guns, a sound no being who had faced the eldar ever forgot. Damon ran towards his first kills. The corpse in the water was face down and slowly sinking into the green, algae-thickened murk, supported by the air caught in his cape. The man on the path was on his back, his eyes as wide as full moons, blood leaking out of him in astonishing quantities, turning the earth pathway into terracotta putty.
Damon knelt and made an adjustment to the man’s weapon. Then he started to run back the way he had come.
‘Here he is! Help me!’ he yelled over his shoulder as he ran.
Damon threw himself sideways into the far end of the stable block, putting a heavy wall between him and the canal.
He heard other praecentals approaching, heard their outraged curses as they saw the kills.
Then one of them said, ‘Wait, wait! What’s that sound?’
A plasma weapon’s powercell on overload, you numbwit, Damon thought.
It went off like a bomb, blowing out the far end of the stable block where it overhung the canal. Damon emerged into the smoke, finished off the one man that the blast hadn’t killed with a swift headshot, and counted the other bodies. It was a jigsaw. He had to make sense of the bloody, half-cooked chunks. Four. Two more still close, then. And more squads would be on their way.
How many more would he risk? How many more would it take to slake his frustration?
He looked down at the canal. The water was very still, suddenly.
‘Oh, come on…’ he began.
Gahet looked up at him, an impossible reflection. The telepathic consult was like a hot wire through his brain.
You waste time and expose your presence unnecessarily, Damon.+
‘I’m blowing off steam,’ Damon growled back, hurting.
Fulfill the duty you must perform for us.+
‘All right, just stop–’
Find him and secure the prize. Make him perform his assigned task, or, if he will not do it, perform it for him.+
‘All right, damn you!’ Damon winced.
He turned away from the canal. The two praecentals were rushing him along the towpath. One fired, scorching the air beside Damon with plasma heat, a very near miss.
Damon pulled up his guns, firing both.
What are you doing?+
‘Finishing things,’ Damon replied.
He could hear the other squads moving in. Wet. It was going to get bloody wet.
‘I’ll do your job, Gahet,’ he said, with no respect at all, ‘once I’m done here.’
11
Communion
‘Let us start with the truth, and move on to more interesting matters.’
– attributed to Malcador the Sigillite
Two Legions slowly marched, side by side, along the Avenue of Heroes, towards the Castrum and the Fortress, like a half-black, half-blue river. On the right-hand side of the column marched the Ultramarines; on the left, the Dark Angels. Behind the main column came the remnants of the other Legions, and then the Army units and the Titan engines. Crowds cheered and waved from both sides of the vast route.
‘The last time this many banners were carried aloft must have been on Ullanor,’ the Lion said.
‘I think so,’ Guilliman agreed.
They were walking side by side at the head of the procession, half-shaded by the Legion standards being carried at their heels. Holguin and Redloss escorted the Lion, and Gorod and his lieutenant, Maglios, flanked the Avenging Son.
‘It is a glorious feeling,’ the Lion said, ‘and one we deserve. Your warriors, after the ordeal of Nuceria and the many battles of Lorgar’s “shadow crusade” – mine after Thramas and the fury of the warp.’
‘You will tell me, I hope, about the Thramas Crusade in detail,’ Guilliman said.
‘I will.’
‘You fought against Konrad? Against the Eighth Legion?’
‘Traitors all, sad be the day. I have prisoners aboard the flagship, including his First Captain, Sevatar.’
Guilliman glanced sideways at his expressionless brother.
‘Have you interrogated him? Have you rooted out the cause of this treason?’
‘Have you?’ asked the Lion. ‘In your wars against Angron and Lorgar, have you identified their argument?’
‘It is the warp,’ replied Guilliman. ‘It is an infection, a pollution of the soul. On Nuceria, the horrors I saw heaped upon Angron by one he considered a comrade… Our brothers, even the Lupercal, have not turned against us. They have been turned.’
‘I think so too,’ the Lion replied. ‘It is a hard thought to hold. I cannot imagine having cause to turn against our father and Terra, but I can at least conceive of the possibility of a cogent argument for dissent. This treason… it spreads like a plague. It is contagious.’
‘It is. Which is why, I imagine, you came to me.’
The Lion glanced sideways at Guilliman.
‘Roboute. Such a question.’
‘Your ships were not lost, brother. They were heading for Macragge when the storm struck. I have read the flight-logs. Did you fear I’d turned with Horus and become a threat to our father? Have you come to sanction me, like Russ’s wolf pack?’
The Lion laughed.
‘My dear Roboute, I did not think for a moment that you had turned. I thought you’d done much, much worse.’ He looked at Guilliman. ‘I think we both know you have.’
He glanced at the Castrum ahead, the towering bulk of the Fortress of Hera.
‘That is quite a place,’ he said. ‘I am impressed. I expect a proper tour and inspection.’
The Legions march along the Avenue of Heroes
The Memorial Gardens lay to the east of the Avenue of Heroes. John Grammaticus watched the glittering column move by, banners aloft, heading up the titanic street to the Porta Hera, a cyclopean gateway in the Castrum wall that he could see from six kilometres away.
It was a display of force, John had to admit. The Legions were good at that. They were good at killing too, and the vanguard, the Army and the Titan engines… a god-slaying force. John was especially impressed by the retinues of the so called ‘Shattered Legions’. They suggested a human resolve that John knew the Cabal doubted. They stood together, despite their losses. They fought on.
We always have, he thought. Watch us for just a moment, though a moment to you might be ten thousand years to us, and you’ll see. We are not children. We have morals and souls.
The Memorial Gardens were far too civilised. Walls of inscribed stone flanked oblong pools of pale water lilies and beds of rushes and vein flowers. The Ultramarines dignified their dead. They engraved their names upon the flagstones of the Avenue of Heroes, and again here in the gardens, and also on the black marble walls of the Chapel of Memorial in the Great Fortress.
It was the gardens where the dead were actu
ally interred, in pre-built catacombs that lay beneath the beds and pools.
John had a vision of the day when, after endless centuries of war, there would be no room left on the flagstones of the avenue to fit more names, and the catacombs would be full, and the walls of the chapel would be covered. Where would they commemorate all their dead then?
He blinked back the thought.
The funerary shuttles had been cleared to land on the raised stone decks of the garden compound. Eight of them, wings hinged up like butterflies, sat side by side on the landing terrace. Their cargoes of sarcophagi would be unloaded later. Because of the parade, there weren’t enough Legion personnel available to conduct the rites and deliver the dead in respectful silence to their resting places.
John was content enough, however. As Edaris Cluet, an officer of repatriation, the funerary flights had got him to the surface of Macragge and deep inside the great Civitas. The Ultramarines solemn respect for their fallen had allowed him to circumvent almost all of Macragge’s complex layers of planetary security.
Most of the other crews from the repatriation flights had gone to the edge of the landing terrace to watch the procession pass along the Avenue. A few were running systems checks on the landers, which were parked on the deck with their canopies up and their loading ramps down.
Time to slip away. Time to step out of Edaris Cluet and find a new person to hide in.
John picked up his pack, slung it across his shoulder and walked quietly away through the lawns and bowers. The jet-black mourning uniform was sober and smart, and, because it was austere and lacked any rank pins except the golden ultima-and-omega of the Funeral Watch, it suggested he was of a higher rank than he actually was. In a city of uniforms, he could pass for almost anyone and not be called on it, except by those with the most expert and detailed knowledge of Legion liveries.
All eyes were on other, grander things. Unchallenged and unobserved, he walked up the northern pathway of the gardens, passing under box-hedge arches cut for transhuman statures, and along flagged walks shaded by stately yew and sorona trees.
