by Dan Abnett
‘Foolish thoughts,’ Qruze decided. ‘It’s only a rescue run. I cannot for the life of me imagine what the Emperor’s Children thought they were doing, going into this hell. I served with them, in the early days, you know? Fine fellows. Very proper. They taught the Wolves a thing or two about decorum, thank you very much! Model soldiers. Put us to shame on the Eastern Fringe, so they did, but that was back then.’
‘It certainly was,’ said Loken.
‘It most certainly was,’ agreed Qruze, missing the irony entirely. ‘I can’t imagine what they thought they were doing here.’
‘Prosecuting a war?’ Loken suggested.
Qruze looked at him diffidently. ‘Are you mocking me, Garviel?’
‘Never, sir. I would never do that.’
‘I hope we’re deployed,’ Marr grumbled, ‘and soon.’
‘We won’t be,’ Qruze declared. He rubbed the patchy grey goatee that decorated his long, lined face. He was most certainly not a son of Horus.
‘I’ve business to attend to,’ Loken said, excusing himself. ‘I’ll take my leave, brothers.’
Marr glared at Loken, annoyed to be left alone with the Half-Heard. Loken winked and wandered off, hearing Qruze embark on one of his long and tortuous ‘stories’ to Marr.
Loken went downship to the barrack decks of Tenth Company. His men were waiting, half-armoured, weapons and kit spread out for fitting. Apprenta and servitors manned portable lathes and forge carts, making final, precise adjustments to plate segments. This was just displacement activity: the men had been battle-ready for weeks.
Loken took the time to appraise Vipus and the other squad leaders of the situation, and then spoke briefly to some of the new blood warriors they’d raised to company service during the voyage. These men were especially tense. One Forty Twenty might see their baptism as full Astartes.
In the solitude of his arming chamber, Loken sat for a while, running through certain mental exercises designed to promote clarity and concentration. When he grew bored of them, he took up the book Sindermann had loaned him.
He’d read a good deal less of The Chronicles of Ursh during the voyage than he’d intended. The commander had kept him busy. He folded the heavy, yellowed pages open with ungloved hands and found his place.
The Chronicles were as raw and brutal as Sindermann had promised. Long-forgotten cities were routinely sacked, or burned, or simply evaporated in nuclear storms. Seas were regularly stained with blood, skies with ash, and landscapes were often carpeted with the bleached and numberless bones of the conquered. When armies marched, they marched a billion strong, the ragged banners of a million standards swaying above their heads in the atomic winds. The battles were stupendous maelstroms of blades and spiked black helms and baying horns, lit by the fires of cannons and burners. Page after page celebrated the cruel practices and equally cruel character of the despot Kalagann.
It amused Loken, for the most part. Fanciful logic abounded, as did an air of strained realism. Feats of arms were described that no pre-Unity warriors could have accomplished. These, after all, were the feral hosts of techno-barbarians that the proto-Astartes, in their crude thunder armour, had been created to bring to heel. Kalagann’s great generals, Lurtois and Sheng Khal and, later, Quallodon, were described in language more appropriate to primarchs. They carved, for Kalagann, an impossibly vast domain during the latter part of the Age of Strife.
Loken had skipped ahead once or twice, and saw that later parts of the work recounted the fall of Kalagann, and described the apocalyptic conquest of Ursh by the forces of Unity. He saw passages referring to enemy warriors bearing the thunderbolt and lightning emblem, which had been the personal device of the Emperor before the eagle of the Imperium was formalised. These men saluted with the fist of unity, as Qruze still did, and were clearly arrayed in thunder armour. Loken wondered if the Emperor himself would be mentioned, and in what terms, and wanted to look to see if he could recognise the names of any of the proto-Astartes warriors.
But he felt he owed it to Kyril Sindermann to read the thing thoroughly, and returned to his original place and order. He quickly became absorbed by a sequence detailing Shang Khal’s campaigns against the Nordafrik Conclaves. Shang Khal had assembled a significant horde of irregular levies from the southern client states of Ursh, and used them to support his main armed strengths, including the infamous Tupelov Lancers and the Red Engines, during the invasion.
The Nordafrik technogogues had preserved a great deal more high technology for the good of their conclaves than Ursh possessed, and sheer envy, more than anything, motivated the war. Kalagann was hungry for the fine instruments and mechanisms the conclaves owned.
Eight epic battles marked Shang Khal’s advance into the Nordafrik zones, the greatest of them being Xozer. Over a period of nine days and nights, the war machines of the Red Engines blasted their way across the cultivated agroponic pastures and reduced them back to the desert from which they had originally been irrigated and nurtured. They cut through the laser thorn hedges and the jewelled walls of the outer conclave, and unleashed dirty atomics into the heart of the ruling zone, before the Lancers led a tidal wave of screaming berserkers through the breach into the earthly paradise of the gardens at Xozer, the last fragment of Eden on a corrupted planet.
Which they, of course, trampled underfoot.
Loken felt himself skipping ahead again, as the account bogged down in interminable lists of battle glories and honour rolls. Then his eyes alighted on a strange phrase, and he read back. At the heart of the ruling zone, a ninth, minor battle had marked the conquest, almost as an afterthought. One bastion had remained, the murengon, or walled sanctuary, where the last hierophants of the conclaves held out, practising, so the text said, their ‘sciomancy by the flame lyght of their burning realm’.
Shang Khal, wishing swift resolution to the conquest, had sent Anult Keyser to crush the sanctuary. Keyser was lord martial of the Tupelov Lancers and, by various bonds of honour, could call freely upon the services of the Roma, a squadron of mercenary fliers whose richly decorated interceptors, legend said, never landed or touched the earth, but lived eternally in the scope of the air. During the advance on the murengon, Keyser’s oneirocriticks – and by that word, Loken understood the text meant ‘interpreters of dreams’ – had warned of the hierophants’ sciomancy, and their phantasmagorian ways.
When the battle began, just as the oneirocriticks had warned, majiks were unleashed. Plagues of insects, as thick as monsoon rain and so vast in their swirling masses that they blacked out the sun, fell upon Keyser’s forces, choking air intakes, weapon ports, visors, ears, mouths and throats. Water boiled without fire. Engines overheated or burned out. Men turned to stone, or their bones turned to paste, or their flesh succumbed to boils and buboes and flaked off their limbs. Others went mad. Some became daemons and turned upon their own.
Loken stopped reading and went back over the sentences again, ‘…and where the plagueing insects did not crawl, or madness lye, so men did blister and recompose them ownselves onto the terrible likeness of daemons, such foul pests as the afreet and the d’genny that persist in the silent desert places. In such visage, they turned uponn their kin and gnawed then upon their bloody bones…’
Some became daemons and turned upon their own.
Anult Keyser himself was slain by one such daemon, which had, just hours previously, been his loyal lieutenant, Wilhym Mardol.
When Shang Khal heard the news, he flew into a fury, and went at once to the scene, bringing with him what the text described as his ‘wrathsingers’, who appeared to be magi of some sort. Their leader, or master, was a man called Mafeo Orde, and somehow, Orde drew the wrathsingers into a kind of remote warfare with the hierophants. The text was annoyingly vague about exactly what occurred next, almost as if it was beyond the understanding of the writer. Words such as ‘sorcery’ and ‘majik’ were employed frequency, without qualification, and there were invocations to dark, primordial gods that
the writer clearly thought his audience would have some prior knowledge of. Since the start of the text, Loken had seen references to Kalagann’s ‘sorcerous’ powers, and the ‘invisibles artes’ that formed a key part of Ursh’s power, but he had taken them to be hyperbole. This was the first time sorcery had appeared on the page, as a kind of fact.
The earth trembled, as if afraid. The sky tore like silk. Many in the Urshite force heard the voices of the dead whispering to them. Men caught fire, and walked around, bathed in lambent flames that did not consume them, pleading for help. The remote war between the wrathsingers and the hierophants lasted for six days, and when it ended, the ancient desert was thick with snow, and the skies had turned blood red. The air formations of the Roma had been forced to flee, lest their craft be torn from the heavens by screaming angels and dashed down upon the ground.
At the end of it, all the wrathsingers were dead, except Orde himself. The murengon was a smoking hole in the ground, its stone walls so hideously melted by heat they had become slips of glass. And the hierophants were extinct.
The chapter ended. Loken looked up. He had been so enthralled, he wondered if he had missed an alert or a summons. The arming chamber was quiet. No signal runes blinked on the wall panel.
He began to read the next part, but the narrative had switched to a sequence concerning some northern war against the nomadic caterpillar cities of the Taiga. He skipped a few pages, hunting for further mention of Orde or sorcery, but could detect none. Frustrated, he set the book aside.
Sindermann… had he given Loken this work deliberately? To what end? A joke? Some veiled message? Loken resolved to study it, section by section, and take his questions to his mentor.
But he’d had enough of it for the time being. His mind was clouded and he wanted it clear for combat. He walked to the vox plate beside the chamber door and activated it.
‘Officer of the watch. How can I serve, captain?’
‘Any word from the speartip?’
‘I’ll check, sir. No, nothing routed to you.’
‘Thank you. Keep me appraised.’
‘Sir.’
Loken clicked the vox off. He walked back to where he had left the book, picked it up, and marked his page. He was using a thin sliver of parchment torn from the edge of one of his oath papers as a marker. He closed the book, and went to put it away in the battered metal crate where he kept his belongings. There were precious few items in there, little to show for such a long life. It reminded him of Jubal’s meagre effects. If I die, Loken thought, who will clean this out? What will they preserve? Most of the bric-a-brac was worthless trophies, stuff that only meant something to him: the handle of a combat knife he’d broken off in the gullet of a green-skin warboss; long feathers, now musty and threadbare, from the hatchet-beak that had almost killed him on Balthasar, decades earlier; a piece of dirty, rusted wire, knotted at each end, which he’d used to garrote a nameless eldar champion when all other weapons had been lost to him.
That had been a fight. A real test. He decided he ought to tell Oliton about it, sometime. How long ago was it? Ages past, though the memory was as fresh and heavy as if it had been yesterday. Two warriors, deprived of their common arsenals by the circumstance of war, stalking one another through the fluttering leaves of a wind-lashed forest. Such skill and tenacity. Loken had almost wept in admiration for the opponent he had slain.
All that was left was the wire and the memory, and when Loken passed, only the wire would remain. Whoever came here after his death would likely throw it out, assuming it to be a twist of rusty wire and nothing more.
His rummaging hands turned up something that would not be cast away. The data-slate Karkasy had given him. The data-slate from Keeler.
Loken sat back and switched it on, flicking through the picts again. Rare picts. Tenth Company, assembled on the embarkation deck for war. The company banner. Loken himself, framed against the bold colour of the flag. Loken taking his oath of moment. The Mournival group: Abaddon, Aximand, Torgaddon and himself, with Targost and Sedirae.
He loved the picts. They were the most precious material gift he’d ever received, and the most unexpected. Loken hoped that, through Oliton, he might leave some sort of useful legacy. He doubted it would be anything like as significant as these images.
He scrolled the picts back into their file, and was about to deactivate the slate when he saw, for the first time, there was another file lodged in the memory. It was stored, perhaps deliberately, in an annex to the slate’s main data folder, hidden from cursory view. Only a tiny icon digit ‘2’ betrayed that the slate was loaded with more than one file of material.
It took him a moment to find the annex and open it. It looked like a folder of deleted or discarded images, but there was a tag caption attached to it that read ‘IN CONFIDENCE’.
Loken cued it. The first pict washed into colour on the slate’s small screen. He stared at it, puzzled. It was dark, unbalanced in colour or contrast, almost unreadable. He thumbed up the next, and the next.
And stared in horrid fascination.
He was looking at Jubal, or rather the thing that Jubal had become in the final moments. A rabid, insane mass, ploughing down a dark hallway towards the viewer.
There were more shots. The light, the sheen of them, seemed unnatural, as if the picter unit that had captured them had found difficulty reading the image. There were clear, sharp-focused droplets of gore and sweat frozen in the air as they splashed out in the foreground. The thing behind them, the thing that had shaken the droplets out, was fuzzy and imprecise, but never less than abominable.
Loken switched the slate off and began to strip off his armour as quickly as he could. When he was down to the thick, mimetic polymers of his sub-suit bodyglove, he stopped, and pulled on a long, hooded robe of brown hemp. He took up the slate, and a vox-cuff, and went outside.
‘Nero!’
Vipus appeared, fully plated except for his helm. He frowned in confusion at the sight of Loken’s attire.
‘Garvi? Where’s your armour? What’s going on?’
‘I’ve an errand to run,’ Loken replied quickly, clasping on the vox-cuff. ‘You have command here in my absence.’
‘I do?’
‘I’ll return shortly.’ Loken held up the cuff, and allowed it to auto-sync channels with Vipus’s vox system. Small notice lights on the cuff and the collar of Vipus’s armour flashed rapidly and then glowed in unison.
‘If the situation changes, if we’re called forwards, vox me immediately. I’ll not be derelict of my duties. But there’s something I must do.’
‘Like what?’
‘I can’t say,’ Loken said.
Nero Vipus paused and nodded. ‘Just as you say, brother. I’ll cover for you and alert you of any changes.’ He stood watching as his captain, hooded and hurrying, slipped away down an access tunnel and was swallowed by the shadows.
THE GAME WAS going so badly against him that Ignace Karkasy decided it was high time he got his fellow players drunk. Six of them, with a fairly disinterested crowd of onlookers, occupied a table booth at the forward end of the Retreat, under the gilded arches. Beyond them, remembrancers and off-duty soldiers, along with ship personnel relaxing between shifts, and a few iterators (one could never tell if an iterator was on duty or off) mingled in the long, crowded chamber, drinking, eating, gaming and talking. There was a busy chatter, laughter, the clink of glasses. Someone was playing a viol. The Retreat had become quite the social focus of the flagship.
Just a week or two before, a sozzled second engineer had explained to Karkasy that there had never been any gleeful society aboard the Vengeful Spirit, nor on any other line ship in his experience. Just quiet after-shift drinking and sullen gambling schools. The remembrancers had brought their bohemian habits to the warship, and the crewmen and soldiery had been drawn to its light.
The iterators, and some senior ship officers, had clucked disapprovingly at the growing, casual conviviality, but the mingl
ing was permitted. When Comnenus had voiced his objections to the unlicensed carousing the Vengeful Spirit was now host to, someone – and Karkasy suspected the commander himself – had reminded him that the purpose of the remembrancers was to meet and fraternise. Soldiers and Navy adepts flocked to the Retreat, hoping to find some poor poet or chronicler who would record their thoughts and experiences for posterity. Though mostly, they came to get a skinful, play cards and meet girls.
It was, in Karkasy’s opinion, the finest achievement of the remembrancer programme to date: to remind the expedition warriors they were human, and to offer them some fun.
And to win rudely from them at cards.
The game was targe main, and they were playing with a pack of square-cut cards that Karkasy had once lent to Mersadie Oliton. There were two other remembrancers at the table, along with a junior deck officer, a sergeant-at-arms and a gunnery oberst. They were using, as bidding tokens, scurfs of gilt that someone had cheerfully scraped off one of the stateroom’s golden columns. Karkasy had to admit that the remembrancers had abused their facilities terribly. Not only had the columns been half-stripped to the ironwork, the murals had been written on and painted over. Verses had been inscribed in patches of sky between the shoulders of ancient heroes, and those ancient heroes found themselves facing eternity wearing comical beards and eye patches. In places, walls and ceilings had been whitewashed, or lined with gum-paper, and entire tracts of new composition inscribed upon them.
‘I’ll sit this hand out,’ Karkasy announced, and pushed back his chair, scooping up the meagre handful of scraped gilt flecks he still owned. ‘I’ll find us all some drinks.’
The other players murmured approval as the sergeant-at-arms dealt the next hand. The junior deck officer, his head sunk low and his eyes hooded, thumped the heels of his hands together in mock applause, his elbows on the table top, his hands fixed high above his lolling head.
Karkasy moved off through the crowd to find Zinkman. Zinkman, a sculptor, had drink, an apparently bottomless reserve of it, though where he sourced it from was anyone’s guess. Someone had suggested Zinkman had a private arrangement with a crewman in climate control who distilled the stuff. Zinkman owed Karkasy at least one bottle, from an unfinished game of merci merci two nights earlier.
