The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  That poor, mind-stunted fool Mendel. So proud of his place at the Omnissiah’s side, now achieving in death far more than he ever had in life.

  ‘Then the last element on your list of requisition will be carried out at once, Kaeria of the Silent Sisterhood. The Mechanicum will provide you with a general.’

  Six

  Faith and fear

  Unity

  Mortis-pulse

  The boy who would be king was a boy no more. The Emperor in His ageless adulthood walked the war-scarred tundra, cloaked against the cold. He held a naked blade low in one hand. The sword was dull in deactivation, the circuitry lining the blade cold and unlit.

  Evidence of battle lay strewn in every direction, from the churned earth of shell craters to the remains of warriors on both sides. He walked between the bodies, knee-deep and in their thousands, as the snow began to fall in a miserable grey spill. Around Him, warriors in clanking, crunching armour plate strode among the fallen, dragging comrades from the corpse-heaps and executing wounded foes with swift plunges of cackling chainblades.

  The Emperor paid heed to none of this. The theatre of a battle’s aftermath held no claim on His attention. He walked on, stepping over His own injured men who called for His aid, approaching a ring of His elite warriors. They guarded a lone, grey-haired figure, clad in an unreliably cloned fur cloak. The captured man hugged himself against the biting cold, standing a little hunched over from his wounds.

  He looked up as the Emperor approached. He smiled without mirth, showing bloody teeth.

  ‘So this is how it ends.’

  The Emperor stood still, saying nothing. The wind pulled at His long hair. The weak sun glinted in flashes from His lowered sword.

  ‘Why?’ the captive asked bitterly. ‘Why annihilate my people like this?’

  ‘Your people will be allowed to live on,’ replied the Emperor. ‘Your army, and you yourself, could not.’

  ‘The “Emperor of Terra”,’ the grey-haired captive said with a laughing sneer. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The wound in his gut was eating him alive.

  ‘No,’ said the Emperor. ‘The Emperor of Mankind.’

  The prisoner hawked blood onto the snow. ‘Of mankind now? One nation wasn’t enough for you, nor even one world, so you’ll take your cancerous touch to the stars.’

  ‘Your defiance is ill-placed,’ the Emperor replied.

  ‘Arrogant beast!’ He wheezed through the ruination of his chest. ‘Hubris beyond reckoning. Madness beyond definition.’

  The Emperor turned into the wind, narrowing His eyes as He looked across the ravaged battlefield. ‘And yet, victory.’

  ‘Tyrant!’ the captive screamed. ‘Butcher of the enlightened!’ Spit sprayed into the evening air, steaming where it landed. ‘Apostate! Heretic!’

  The Emperor endured this spittle-punctuated tirade with a quiet patience somewhere between dignity and immunity. ‘I bring illumination,’ He said.

  ‘You bring damnation!’ the captured warlord raged.

  ‘I warned you, priest,’ said the Emperor. ‘Long ago, I warned you. We stand here now because of the choices you made.’

  ‘I pissed on your warnings then,’ the captive snapped back. ‘As I piss on your enlightenment now. Let the sword fall! I go to my god’s embrace. And with my last breath, I will curse the blood in your veins.’

  One of the Custodians encircling him moved forwards, pounding the butt of his guardian spear into the side of the man’s head. Though he pulled the blow, scarcely seeking to injure let alone kill, it was enough to break the man’s eye socket and burst the orb within, turning it to shattered jelly.

  The captive warlord went down into the snow, howling, clutching his savaged skull.

  ‘Restrain yourself, Sagittarus,’ the Emperor said. The Custodian hesitated, bowed his head to his master, then returned to the ranks.

  And then, as the kneeling prisoner cried out and pressed frostbitten hands to his broken face, the Emperor spoke to a soul that shouldn’t be there at all.

  ‘Greetings, Ra.’

  Ra remained back from the gathering, his gaze drifting between the Emperor and the Custodians. The latter wore suits of armour far less ornate than the one he wore himself. These were his kindred in the years before he joined them. They still waged wars against the techno-barbarian hordes claiming dominion over Terra, before the rise of the Legions and the commencement of the Great Crusade.

  ‘Sire,’ he greeted the Emperor. As ever, nothing about his surroundings felt like a dream or a vision. The wind whipped at Ra’s royal crimson cloak. The charnel house reek of the battlefield threaded its way through his helm’s filtration systems. Somehow, it always did.

  His master turned, leaving the Custodians ringing the wounded prisoner. The Emperor’s face was serenely troubled – within it, Ra saw several shifting visages: the worried concern of the boy who would be king; the stern resolve of the Great Crusader; the tranquil caution of the Ruler of All Mankind.

  ‘You received a mortis-pulse, I suspect.’

  ‘From the Protector,’ said Ra. ‘You sensed it?’

  ‘No. I sensed the entity in the outward tunnels. The ancient presence drawing nearer to the walls of the Impossible City. I sensed when it struck. No Protector could survive that. When it struck, I sensed its name. I imagine your slain Protector sought to inform you of this in the only way he was able, via his mortis-pulse. Most likely the message conveyed the creature’s name.’

  ‘The Protector’s audio transmission was nothing more than aetheric shrieking.’

  ‘You have heard the warp-creatures speak Gothic in battle, Ra. They draw such knowledge from the minds of the slain, leeching human thought to form threats, challenges and the like. Yet they lack language and identity as human cognition recognises such things. The aetheric shrieking was its name. I heard it, felt it, myself.’

  At Ra’s boots, a fallen warrior – one of the crudely armoured Thunder Warriors who had once marched at the Emperor’s side – sought to crawl across the frozen ground. Ra ignored the dying man, doubting he even existed to the wounded warrior.

  The Emperor noted the Custodian’s hesitation. ‘Do you doubt me, Ra?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s doubt, sire. More a lack of comprehension.’

  ‘Your comprehension of psychic and aetheric principles has never been as effortless as Jasaric’s or as accepting as Constantin’s, but this concept should not be beyond you.’

  Despite their surroundings, Ra snorted a brief laugh. ‘How you flatter me, my Emperor.’

  The Emperor ignored the weak attempt at sarcasm. ‘When I speak to you, to others, am I speaking aloud? Does my mouth move and form the shapes of human language? Does a human voice emerge? Or is it merely how mortal minds process my presence and my psychic will?’

  Ra nodded. This, at least, was familiar ground. Many were the times that the Emperor had faced allies or foes, speaking countless tongues without hesitation, and even those with no grasp of the same languages and lexicons had perfectly understood the Master of Mankind’s words.

  ‘It is a similar principle,’ the Emperor stated.

  ‘Why would a daemon cry out its name?’

  The Emperor’s dark eyes flickered at his bodyguard’s choice of words. ‘They do so almost unceasingly. They emanate the concepts and moments of emotion that gave them form. Humankind interprets those emanations as sound – the shrieking and roaring you hear when you do battle with them. They are declaring what they are. You hear it as who they are. The one we speak of now is the entity born from the first murder, when a human first took the life of another outside of the need to survive.’

  Ra said nothing. The Emperor’s eyes unfocused, as if He looked back to that very moment in antiquity. When He spoke again, His voice was softer, mellifluous with distraction. ‘So many minds look to the taming of fir
e as the moment humanity tore itself apart from the melange of biological life on Old Earth, elevating mankind above the level of beasts. They point to many such moments and no two insights agree – fire, the wheel, gunpowder, jet propulsion, the Navigator gene… All wrong. It was that moment, Ra. A deed that even false, inane, insane religions have cursed throughout history. That one act set humanity irrevocably apart, feeding the beings of the warp, putting us on the first step of a long, long path.’

  The Emperor’s eyes cleared. He looked at Ra once more, not through him. ‘And here we are, so much further along the path. Still seeking to leave it.’

  Ra stood in silence, feeling the wind caressing his face with unwanted fingers. The Ten Thousand were blessed above any others and philosophical discussions with the Emperor were hardly unknown to them, but the bleak severity of his master’s words turned Ra’s blood slow, sluggish and cold.

  ‘The End of Empires,’ the Emperor said.

  ‘My king?’

  ‘You cannot reweave warp creatures’ names from base concept to human language without an element of psychic adaptation in the translation. As close as it can be rendered into Gothic, that is what the entity’s name means. The End of Empires.’

  Now, truly, Ra’s blood ran cold. Ice flooded his veins in its place. ‘Sire, why did you summon me again so soon?’

  The Emperor turned, and Ra followed without needing to be beckoned. Together they walked back through the battle’s aftermath, accompanied by the cries of the wounded and the snap-crack of execution gunfire. As they approached the circle of Custodians and the kneeling, bleeding warlord, Ra couldn’t help but look at the past incarnations of his own kindred. There was Jasaric, tall and proud; Constantin, stoic and observant; Sagittarus, choleric and wild.

  To human eyes each of the gathered warriors would look scarcely different to any other, but to Ra each was as distinct as separate songs. How humbling it was, to see them like this, walking the scarred earth of Terra in the time before he stood among their number. A handful of years after this moment, Constantin Valdor would come for him, taking him as a child from–

  ‘Tell me, Ra,’ said the Emperor. He aimed His blade at the kneeling warlord. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  Ra followed the silver sword down to the wounded man. He knew of this battle from the archives, had seen picts ripped from primitive helmet footage of the conflict playing out. He had even seen a few rare surviving murals depicting the man in robes of flowing red, addressing vast crowds. Ra knew who the defeated warlord was.

  ‘The Priest-King of Maulland Sen,’ Ra said. ‘In the moments before you executed him.’

  ‘That is a title and a moment in time. What do you see?’

  ‘A man. A man kneeling on the snow.’

  ‘That is better,’ the Emperor agreed. He stepped closer to the kneeling man, activating His blade. Fire cobwebbed down the circuits lining both sides of His sword. None of the gathered warriors paid any notice, nor did the warlord himself.

  ‘I met him long before he was the priest-king,’ the Emperor said. ‘He began as a holy man, a mendicant preacher wandering the northern wastes, gathering untainted food and purified water, giving it freely to those in need. He claimed it was his calling, and that his god lived in his kindness. It was a calling, of course. A call that was answered by the beings of the immaterium. They gave him the power to feed his beleaguered tribe and heal their ills, and his clan grew. When savage winters ate away at the other tribes, his clan sheltered beneath the protection of his power. He kept them fed, protected and unseen from the eyes of their hunting foes. Soon, hundreds of men and women were huddling for warmth within his mercy, and offered their thanks to the god that he believed he served.

  ‘Yet each miracle took more effort, Ra. More sacrifice. The end always justified the means. First the conundrums were moral in nature. What does it matter if another clan starves, if it allows his tribe to survive? Soon enough the rituals grew more occult in order to achieve their ends. What is the murder of a rival, if that death guarantees another ten years of peace? What is the life of one child, if the offer of its bloody, beating heart will ensure a monarch’s immortality? Do you see?’

  Ra saw. Just as he had seen the monuments to massacre in the pict archives, from the fall of Maulland Sen.

  ‘The warp rarely makes itself known in manifest form. The damnation flooding the webway is the crescendo of its siren song. Its immensity and physicality is what makes the threat so unprecedented. Far more often, the warp seethes behind the veil, it curdles thoughts inside a skull, it inks the blood in men and women’s veins. And that is enough. More than enough. It brings us to moments like these, in the company of ambitious, faithful men, too proud to see their own deception.’

  Ra stared down at the kneeling, bleeding priest-king. Gone were the gene-abominations and witchcraft-marked men in their thousands that had formed his ragged armies. He was alone, moments from breathing his last. Soon his sick blood would taint the Emperor’s blade.

  ‘Think of this man’s clan,’ continued the Emperor. ‘As a holy man he had begun with offers of food and the promise of survival. Sensing his susceptibility, the warp darkened around the candle flame of his life’s light. He prayed, and the warp answered.

  ‘Soon his people were too numerous to hide. Other tribes came for his clan’s riches. This man, this revered holy lord, led his people to the machines of the Old Ages, cloning and replicating and gene-forging flawed warriors to wage war for territory.

  ‘The clan branded their own flesh and ran to war alongside these genetic brutes, crying up to the sky for the same power their overlord enjoyed. And how far they had fallen. Committing any act in the belief of their own righteousness. All from superstition. All from ignorance.

  ‘All because one charismatic man believed that the powers that heeded his calls could be trusted. By the time he realised they could not, he believed himself powerful enough to control them, independent enough to resist them. What harm in one more gift, if it allowed his clan to thrive? What harm in one more sacrifice, if it ensured a strong harvest or victory in a coming war? And when it came time to die, what would this powerful, independent man do? Would he go silently into the ground? Would he slumber upon a funeral pyre? Or would he – for the good of his people – reach for longer life at any cost?’

  Ra still stared at the defeated monarch. The Custodian knew all there was to know from the archives. He knew of the barbarity practised by the Maulland Sen Confederacy. He had seen pict evidence of the bone pits, those golgothan barrows; every day of his adult life he had fought alongside other gold-armoured warriors who had been there for the dismantling of the confederacy itself.

  ‘Superstition and ignorance always attract the warp’s denizens,’ continued the Emperor. ‘For the core of religion is the twinned principle of arrogance and fear. Fear of oblivion. Fear of an unfair life and an arbitrary universe. Fear of there simply being nothing, no great and grand scheme to existence. The fear, ultimately, of being powerless.’

  The Custodian narrowed his eyes. Rarely did the Emperor elucidate His reasoning in such stark terms. And why now? To what end? Ra felt the prickle of unease making its threading way up his spine.

  ‘Look at him, Ra. Truly look at him.’

  Ra looked. The priest-king could hardly have appeared less like his treacherously magnificent depictions, with his red robes of office reduced to scorched rags hanging at the edges of his broken armour, and the cloak of cloned fur blackened from flamer burns. The great demagogue stared up at the Emperor with the unshattered half of his face dirtied by blood and matted hair.

  ‘Sire, I don’t…’

  But he did. Talons rippled in the shadows cast by the man’s cloak, glassy and obsidian, impossibly liquid in their caresses. Claws clicked and scratched against one another inside the wide pupil that looked like a hole drilled into the yellowing white of the priest-king
’s remaining eye.Bulges wormed their maggoty way through the man’s veins, bubonically swollen.

  The defeated warlord, this impoverished and humbled ruler, was riven from within.

  ‘What am I looking at, sire? What is this?’

  ‘Faith,’ said the Emperor. ‘You are seeing his faith, through my eyes. Maulland Sen’s massacring priest-king is… what? Another of the Unification Wars’ warlords? Terra had hundreds of them. He died beneath my executing blade, and history’s pages will mark him as nothing more.

  ‘And yet, his life is the path of faith in microcosm. Once a wandering preacher feeding the weak and the lost, ending as a blood-soaked monarch overseeing pogroms and genocides – his teeth stained by cannibal ritual, his skull a shell for the toying touch of warp-entities he does not realise he serves. Every act of violence or pain that he performs is a prayer to those entities, fuelling them, making them stronger behind the veil. What he believes no longer matters, when everything he does feeds their influence.

  ‘This is why we strip the comfort of religion from humanity. These are the slivers of vulnerability that faith cracks open in the human heart. Even if a belief in a lie leads us to do good, eventually it leads to the truth – that we are a species alone in the dark, threatened by the laughing games of sentient malignancies that mortals would call gods.’

  Ra wiped his snow-flecked face with a gauntleted palm. His breathing was calm. His heart was slow. Yet his fingers trembled.

  ‘Are they gods?’

  ‘What is a god?’ the Emperor replied at once, though without challenge. He sounded curious, not defiant.

  ‘I don’t know, sire.’

  ‘A being of great power, perhaps. Am I then a god?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Is a god the focus of prayer and ritual, then? You are named in a god’s honour. Ra – a god of the sun. How many cultures have worshipped the sun or given its arcing journey into the responsibility of a godling’s care? More than even I can count. More than even I have seen. Each sun god or goddess bore a different name, and was revered by different people. The sun rose and fell, as it always has. Did it do so because of their prayers and offerings?’