The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  Coehoorn has reached the tower’s door, but it’s limned with ice and wedged shut. The commissar wraps the metal fingers of his augmetic arm around the handle and tugs sharply. The door opens outwards with a crack of breaking ice and crystal shards fall to the steps.

  “Hurry up, Cadet Samuquan,” snaps Coehoorn. “If that flag isn’t raised by oh-five-hundred hours, you’ll feel the bite of my lash.”

  He nods and through chattering teeth says, “Yes, Commissar Coehoorn!”

  The leather-tough commissar looks his scrawny body up and down, as though wondering whether to take the flag from him, but contents himself with a dismissive shake of his head and leads the way inside.

  The tower is, if anything, colder than the outside, but before he can contemplate this apparent contradiction, Commissar Coehoorn tramps up the spiral steps towards its summit. Stuttering lumen globes fizz with the dimmest illumination, and he quickly follows his class instructor, grateful to be out of the bitingly sharp wind raking the cold granite walls of the scholam. The rest of his class will still be asleep, but not for long. As soon as the aquila flag is raised over the battlements, the blaring reveille call will echo through the bare dormitories at deafening volume.

  Strange… he never thought he’d miss the sprawling stacks and towers of Thracian Primaris, the noise and the stink and the masses of people. As the son of an officer, it was his right to be educated at the scholam, and his mother kept telling him how he should be grateful for such an honour. Some honour, he thinks as he climbs the cold, slippery steps.

  The route upwards is narrow and he has to concentrate to avoid scraping the flag’s finial on the dripping walls. The last boy to do that was flogged. A lot of boys are flogged at Scelus Progenium.

  He reaches the top of the tower without damaging the flag and lets out a misty breath as he emerges onto its crenellated roof. Despite the horribly early hour and the bone-deep tiredness in his limbs, he is stunned at the vista before him. Icy mountains sweep into the sky, taller than the highest stack back home, and utterly white, as though painted with a fresh coat of anti-blast wash.

  A hundred kilometres to the south, a haze of sulphurous fog and smeared light marks Scelium, the nearest city to the gambrel-roofed fortress he now calls home. New cadets pass through Scelium on their way to the scholam, and though it is nowhere near as vast as the cities of Thracian Primaris, it is an impressive place, with ice-locked hive stacks and cliff-like Titan fabriks.

  “This isn’t a scenic tour, cadet,” barks Coehoorn. “Attend to your duty.”

  He nods and marches to the centre of the tower, where he’s been told there will be a slot for him to place the flag. The aquila flag is taken down every night and raised every morning. Why they don’t just leave it up is a mystery to him, but even after only a week he knows the likely fate of any boy who might suggest leaving the flag in place overnight.

  He looks down and sees there’s no slot in the stone. Ice has formed over the ground and he looks desperately for somewhere to place the flag before the first rays of sun break across the mountains. He feels Commissar Coehoorn’s eyes boring into his back and knows this will be his only chance to avoid a flogging.

  He spots what might be a slight depression and uses his boot heel to scrape away the top layer of ice. Taking the flagpole in both hands he thrusts the pointed tip of the base downwards. Ice cracks and he lets out a pent-up breath as the flagpole sinks into the slot. He steps back and salutes as the wind catches the flag and billows its red and black length out above him. The first sunrays peek over the mountaintops and catch the gold-stitched eagle with a crisp yellow light.

  He looks up at the flag, pleased beyond words he has managed to raise the flag without incident. Beyond its rippling fabric, he sees fiery lights and his eyes narrow as he sees that, instead of moving across the sky, they look as if they’re getting bigger. A meteor shower?

  Before he can say anything, the first notes of reveille sound, stirring blasts of a recorded triumphal band that echo through the draughty hallways and icy cloisters of the scholam below. He tilts his head to the side as he sees the lights above are leaving bright afterimages in the sky, as though they’re falling at great speed.

  “Come on, cadet,” snaps Coehoorn. “No dawdling.”

  He points to the sky and says, “Commissar?”

  One look at Coehoorn’s face is enough to tell him that this is something very bad.

  Coehoorn bolts for the stairs, but by now the streaking objects are close enough to see that they are not meteors. They are bare metal seedpods, streaking towards the scholam at incredible speed and leaving burning contrails in their wake. He follows Coehoorn’s dash down to the ramparts.

  By the time he gets there, the reveille notes have been replaced by alert klaxons. Tower-mounted turrets are unmasking and power-shielded mantlets are deploying. Acrid fog billows over the ramparts and he can’t see Commissar Coehoorn. For the first time, he feels real fear and looks up to reacquire the falling seedpods.

  One slams into the far end of the rampart with a thunderous impact and he slips on the ice as the Shockwave spreads. Fire and smoke wreath its landing, but he still can’t see what it is. He hears shouting and the snapping fire of lasrifles. Booming roars bounce around the stone ramparts as more of the metal seedpods slam down.

  He scrabbles to his feet, hot fear pumping around his system as screams and hard bangs roar from the smoke. Man-shaped shadows move in the haze, but something must be distorting their size, because they’re far too big to be men. He runs for the blast door that leads to the safety of the scholam’s interior as more stuttering blasts of gunfire tear through the early morning.

  Commissar Coehoorn staggers from the smoke. The cadet cries out in terror as he sees his instructor’s chest is a deep crater of exploded bone and dripping red matter. The commissar grabs his shoulder and sinks to his knees with a look of incredulous pain. Blood pours from his mouth and his face is a clenched fist of effort as he speaks.

  “Run, Cadet Samuquan,” commands Coehoorn. “Run for your life.”

  He needs no second telling, and abandons the dying commissar. Tears of terror freeze on his cheeks as he slips and slides across the ramparts. More fiery seedpods batter the ramparts and the tramp of heavy feet crunch through the ice. Fizzing las-blasts crisscross the ramparts and he jumps every time he hears the booming detonations of the attackers’ guns.

  He runs blindly, not knowing where he’s going, but knowing he needs to run. It doesn’t matter where he is heading. That he runs is enough for his panic. Sulphurous smoke renders everything blurred and he can’t see anything. He risks a glance over his shoulder and runs headlong into a wall that wasn’t there before. It’s a wall of iron and yellow chevrons, and he flops onto his backside, his face stinging from the impact.

  Looking up, he sees it’s not a wall, it’s an enormous person.

  Surely this towering slab of iron and yellow armour is too big to be a person. The shoulders are far too wide and he carries a smoking gun that’s surely heavier than any normal man could lift.

  But this is no normal man. This is a nightmare from the cautionary vids come to life.

  A horned helmet looks down at him, its eyes a shimmering red. There is no emotion in those eyes, only a blank, soulless emptiness. He is beneath this warrior’s notice, unworthy of being killed.

  “Who are you?” he weeps, feeling his control of his bodily functions surrender to the overwhelming terror.

  The warrior does not answer, but reaches down and lifts him from the ground as easily as though he weighs nothing at all. With a casual flick of the warrior’s wrist he’s flying through the air. He lands heavily and skids across the ice, coming to rest at the edge of the blood-soaked ramparts. He sees he’s not alone. The warriors in the armour of iron have gathered up perhaps thirty other cadets.

  Looking at their tear- and snot-streaked faces, he sees none are over thirteen. Older cadets are tossed from the ramparts like waste. He clos
es his eyes, curling into a foetal ball and crying for his mother.

  CAPTAIN URIEL VENTRIS gasped as his eyes snapped open. The breath caught in his throat as he let out a pent-up gasp of fear. The sensation was so alien to him that he felt a moment’s dislocation as he saw he was no longer in the arming chambers of the 4th Company barracks. He looked down at his hands, where moments before—at least as far as he could remember it had been moments before—he had been cleaning his bolter.

  The iron-armoured warrior… Commissar Coehoorn… the blood-freezing terror…

  The sensation of cold and fear drained from his body, the last lingering traces of the… not vision, but experience, fading from his consciousness. He hadn’t been a passive observer of this youngster’s fate; he had shared it, as though he had actually lived it. He dimly recalled a name, the last, shouted imprecation of the dying commissar. Was that his… the boy’s name?

  “Cadet Samuquan,” whispered Uriel. “That was it.”

  The image of the young boy was so strong in his mind that he stared at his hands as though amazed they were so huge. Uriel lifted his eyes and saw a wall of black marble before him, its surface inscribed with a long list of names inlaid with gold leaf. As he read the first name, he knew without counting them that there were seventy-eight. He knew this because he had carved them himself, a lifetime ago.

  This was the Temple of Correction, the sepulchre of Roboute Guilliman and most revered place in all Ultramar. The walls of this vast circular pantheon were lined with slabs of black marble hewn from the airless quarries of Formaska, each one chiselled with the names of Ultramarines warriors who had fallen in battle.

  Uriel was kneeling before the bronze-edged slab dedicated to the dead of Tarsis Ultra, a desperate war fought to save an Imperial world from the jaws of the Great Devourer. Though the cost had been high, victory had been won, but now that victory had been snatched from the Chapter.

  Tarsis Ultra was gone, its once industrious heart now stilled by an unknown force that had rendered it as desolate and lifeless as Prandium. No one yet knew what had destroyed this world that Roboute Guilliman had liberated during the heady days of the Great Crusade, and the ache in Uriel’s heart was as fresh and raw as it had been on the day Lord Admiral Tiberius had told him of the planet’s doom. The Ultramarines had been oath-sworn to defend Tarsis Ultra, and its death was a stain on their honour that could only be erased by the destruction of the nameless foe that had murdered an entire world.

  Was this why he found himself before the names of the dead? Was he here to reassure them that their sacrifice had not been without merit, that they had died for something worthwhile? Or had he been led here to remind him of his duty? The living endure, but the dead have long memories.

  Uriel stood as sensory input around him pushed the vicarious sensations of another’s life from the rear portions of his brain. A swelling murmured shuffling came to him, the sound of thousands of sandaled feet on marble from the mass of pilgrims thronging the Temple of Correction. Uriel heard their gaps of awe, mixed with the sound of weeping, a common enough response to the sight of Roboute Guilliman’s magnificent form.

  It was said that no one could gaze upon one of the Emperor’s sons without feeling inadequate, but to look upon the serene form of Roboute Guilliman was to be judged worthy of the gift of humanity. None who made the arduous journey to Macragge left without a profound sense of humility and peace.

  Finally daring to turn around, Uriel looked up into the perfect features of his gene-sire.

  Unchanged since the day he had been dealt a mortal wound by a warrior he had once called brother, Roboute Guilliman sat unmoving upon his pale throne atop an enormous plinth of golden marble, a faint shimmer surrounding his armoured body. Frozen in time, the primarch of the Ultramarines stood sentinel over his adoptive home world and regarded those who had come to pay him homage with a serene, impassive gaze. Uriel wished, as did all Ultramarines, that he could have fought alongside the heroes of those long ago days, when the Imperium battled for its very survival against the Arch-Traitors. The Library of Ptolemy was replete with stirring tales of that legendary aeon, though the Ultramarines role in that titanic conflict was so shrouded in veils of secrecy and myth that not even Librarian Tigurius himself knew the whole truth of it.

  Uriel turned his gaze from the primarch, for one cannot long look upon the sun. Instead, he turned his attention to the mighty structure that housed the primarch. It was a magnificent edifice, a marvel of construction so singular that even the most gifted magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus came to wonder at its secrets. Legend told that the tallest peak of Macragge had been quarried for the marble of its construction and an entire warfleet had been dismantled to provide the plasteel. Such hyperbole was, of course, untrue, but served to convey the proper sense of reverence the sepulchre demanded from its visitors.

  Open-mouthed pilgrims wandered the interior precincts of the temple, shepherded by blue-jacketed soldiers from the Macragge Defence Auxilia, who stood guard at each entrance to the primarch’s resting place. These men were not the primarch’s only defence, for hand-picked warriors of Captain Agemman’s 1st Company watched over this sacred temple, their armour bone white and trimmed with gold.

  Helots in grey chitons escorted groups of pilgrims through the temple, pointing out the many architectural wonders of the building, though it would take a lifetime to catalogue them all. Heads craned upwards as the rapturous pilgrims were shown the Primarch’s Arch, which was bathed in intertwined beams of spectral light from the Crystal Dome. Weeping men and women were led through Orphul’s Gate, along the Triumphal Colonnade and finally shown the majesty of the Gallery of Ice and its forest of white and gold.

  None who set foot in the Temple of Correction were ever the same again, whether mortal or Astartes, and though Uriel had visited this place many times, he was changed each time he walked within its memory-haunted precincts.

  Uriel felt a presence next to him and turned to see a man clad in ragged, travel-stained clothes. Unshaven and painfully thin, he was the very image of a pilgrim who had spent every last scrap of his wealth to come to Macragge and stand in the primarch’s presence. A dirty knapsack was slung over one shoulder, and the man reached inside to withdraw something that reflected the light from the Crystal Dome as he held it out to Uriel.

  A small carving cut from steatite lay in the man’s palm, fashioned to resemble a tower with an eagle atop its ramparts. The work was of exquisite quality, easily the equal of anything produced by the artisans of Ultramar, its every carved line worked with infinite care and polished to a smooth finish.

  “Thank you,” said Uriel, touched by this simple gesture, but the man was already turning away. Uriel was about to go after him, to learn this craftsman’s name and where he had come from, but the sound of footsteps behind him pulled him up short as he recognised the heavy tread of Space Marines.

  “We’ve been looking all over for you,” said a gruff voice that suggested it was Uriel’s fault the seekers hadn’t found him until now.

  “You were supposed to be in the company arming chambers,” said another voice, clipped and with the unmistakable sharpness of a native of Macragge.

  Uriel turned from his anonymous benefactor to see two warriors armoured in polished battle armour painted with the colours of 4th Company sergeants. It had been too long since these warriors had stood together, and Uriel’s heart swelled with pride to see the renewed bond of brotherhood between them.

  Learchus, once Uriel’s nemesis at the Agiselus training barracks, but now his loyal supporter, was the quintessential warrior of the Ultramarines. The starched tones of a Macragge native belonged to Learchus, a warrior within whose veins ran the blood of ancient heroes. Though it had been Learchus that saw Uriel sent on his Death Oath, the war on Pavonis had given his veteran sergeant a unique perspective on the circumstances that had forced Uriel to make the decisions that had led to his exile. Learchus’ unbending adherence to the ways of the Codex Astar
tes had been tempered by fighting behind enemy lines on Pavonis, and Uriel now counted him as a true brother.

  Learchus’ companion, Pasanius, was Uriel’s oldest friend. They had grown up together, and Pasanius had helped Uriel when many others had turned their back on the taciturn and brooding recruit from Calth. Such was Pasanius’ bulk that he wore a suit of battle plate that incorporated elements cannibalised from a suit of Terminator armour. Half a head taller than Learchus, his shoulders were broader and his chest wider than even the veterans equipped to wear such blessed suits of armour.

  Uriel smiled to see Pasanius clad in blue and returned to his rank of sergeant once more, for he had been forced to go to war on Pavonis without him. Pasanius now sported a bronze and iron augmetic arm, fashioned to his precise specifications by Techmarine Harkus in his newly adapted forge, one rebuilt to accommodate his extra bulk now that his mortal remains were interred within a Dreadnought.

  Pasanius came forward and shook Uriel’s hand. The augmetic arm was a work of art, a powerful yet delicate mechanism that enhanced Pasanius’ already fearsome strength. Its surfaces glittered in the temple’s multicoloured light, the metal gleaming and pristine, but Uriel caught sight of a series of short grooves cut into the metal by an Astartes combat blade.

  “Harkus will have your hide if he sees that,” said Uriel, nodding towards the grooves.

  “He’ll understand,” said Pasanius. “I had to be sure the Bringer of Darkness was out of me.”

  Uriel nodded, understanding the source of his friend’s caution.

  “Well?” asked Learchus. “Why were you not in the arming chambers?”