The Imperial Truth

by Laurie Goulding

DAWN WAS MAKING its way up the valley as Cebella Devine watched Lyx climb the steps to the high walls overlooking the scene of the previous day's carnage. Cebella's huscarl bodyguards were keeping a respectful distance, and she felt her heart race as Lyx approached.

  'Is it done?' asked Cebella, without turning to face the girl.

  'It is,' confirmed Lyx.

  'And?'

  'There were… complications,' said Lyx, clearly relishing the look of irritation that flitted across Cebella's face.

  'Don't draw this out, Lyx. Tell me.'

  'Raeven imprinted successfully. His Knight is a colt in the stable, wild and strong.'

  'And Albard?'

  Lyx paused, her face a mockery of loss. 'It grieves me to say that after the incident on the Via Argentum, Albard's mind was unprepared to endure a night in the Chamber of Echoes.'

  'Does he live?' asked Cebella.

  Lyx nodded. 'He does, but his Knight refused to bond with him and the bio-neural feedback from that rejection has irreparably damaged his mind. I fear he is lost to us.'

  Cebella finally deigned to face Lyx and the two women shared a look that an outsider might have mistaken for shared grief, but which was in fact a shared complicity.

  'Your pet Sacristan made quite a spectacle of himself,' said Cebella at last.

  'A man will do foolish things for the sake of lust,' agreed Lyx.

  'But he failed to kill Cyprian,' said Cebella. 'Impaled twice and the cantankerous old bastard still breathes. I almost admire him for that.

  Almost.'

  'Yes, Cyprian still lives, but look at what Raeven achieved,' pointed out Lyx. 'The people say they saw him stand and fight a mallahgra with only a powerless sword. From such tales are legends born.'

  'Do we have need of legends?'

  'We will,' said Lyx, as a momentary dizziness swept through her and she blinked away the image of a fiery amber eye and a sweeping storm that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  'Another vision?' asked Cebella, extending a hand to steady her.

  'Perhaps,' nodded Lyx.

  'What do you see?' demanded Cebella, keeping her voice low.

  'A time of great change is coming to Molech,' said Lyx. 'It will be many years from now, but when it comes, a terrible war will be fought. House Devine will play a pivotal role in it.'

  'Raeven?'

  'He will be a great warrior, and his actions will turn the tide.'

  Cebella smiled and released Lyx's arm. She looked up into the lightening sky and pictured the worlds over which her son would claim dominion. Lyx was not the only Adoratrice to have the sight, but her secret powers waxed stronger than any that Cebella had known before.

  'You have grand ambitions for your twin brother, then,' said Cebella.

  'No more than you, mother,' said Lyx.

  LORD OF THE RED SANDS

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  THERE IS ONLY one thing worth fighting for.

  He knows this, while his father languishes in the ignorance of false righteousness; while his brothers play gods to a godless universe; while heartless weaklings claim to be his sons, walking the coward's path over the way of the warrior.

  But he knows - even if no one else will listen or understand - that there is only one thing worth fighting for.

  He crests the barricade, the axes howling in his hands. The dead city sends its finest against him time and again, and time and again the dead city's finest fall back in screaming, hewed chunks of flesh and ceramite. Some wear his brothers' colours - the royal purple of preening Fulgrim, or the drab, pale hues of cadaverous Mortarion. They charge, dreaming of glory, and they die knowing nothing but pain and shame.

  Some of them wear the filthy white of his own sons. They die no differently from the others. They bleed the same blood, and cry the same oaths. They stink just the same when their bodies are ripped open, organs bared to the cold air.

  Flashes of insight come to him in the storm of swords - a name etched upon white armour seems familiar for the span of a heartbeat, or the angle of an axe reminds him of another fight, back in the age of the burning sun beating down upon the red sand.

  He kills every warrior that rises before him, and chases those wise enough to retreat. The former he breaks open with single blows from his straining axes. The latter he hunts in leaping pounces, the way arena beasts once hunted starved men and women.

  Glory?

  Glory is for those too weak to find inner strength, leaving them hollow parasites, feeding on the affection of even lesser men. Glory is for cowards, too afraid to let their names die.

  He stands upon their bodies now, grinding bootprints into their breastplates as he adds to their number. A monument to futility rises at his feet: each death means that he has to climb higher to welcome fresh meat. The hammer-blows of gunfire keep on pounding into his back and shoulders with bestial kicks. An irritation, nothing more. Scarcely even a distraction. This battle was won the moment he set foot in the dead city.

  He buries an axe in the chest of another son, but feels it slip from his blood-slick fingers as the warrior tumbles back. The binding chain at his wrist pulls taut, preventing the weapon's theft, but he sees what they are trying to do - three of his own sons shouting, scrabbling to cling to the axe they stole, even as the blade is buried in one of their bodies.

  A warrior's ultimate sacrifice, trading his life for the chance to disarm an enemy. Their united strength drags at his arm, turning his panting breath to a wet snarl.

  He does not pull back and resist. He launches into them, shattering their armour with foot, with fist, with his dark metal teeth. Their cunning sacrifice avails them nothing but death by bludgeoning rather than the shrieking blade of a chainaxe.

  Their bodies are added to the corpse monument. Every movement is pain, now. Each breath comes from ragged lungs, through bleeding lips.

  There is still time, still time, still time. He can win this war without his brother's guns.

  Conquest?

  What tyrant first dreamed of conquest and clad violent oppression in terms of virtue? Why does the imposition of one will over another draw men like no other sin? For more than two hundred years, the Emperor has demanded that the galaxy align itself to his principles at the cost of ten thousand cultures that lived free and without the need for tyranny. Now Horus demands that the stellar nations of this broken empire dance to his tune instead. Billions die for conquest, to advance the pride of these two vain creatures cast in the shapes of men.

  There is no virtue in fighting for conquest. Nothing is more worthless and hollow than obliterating freedom for the sake of more land, more coin, more voices singing your name in holy hymn.

  Conquest is as meaningless as glory. Worse, it is evil in its selfishness. Both are triumphs only in a fool's crusade.

  No. Not glory, not conquest.

  He follows the blood to his prey. The warrior slouches on the ground, with his back to the wall, his armoured thighs decorated with a sloppy trail of innards. Blood marks his face. Blood marks everything on this world, but the centurion's face is a reflection of the battle itself. Half of his features no longer exist beyond bare, cracked bone - ripped away by the primarch's axe. The officer's remaining eye is narrowed by the preternatural focus necessary to remain alive, without screaming, when your intestines have been torn from your body.

  He should not be alive, and yet here he is, lifting a bolter.

  Angron smiles at the man's beautiful defiance and slaps the gun aside with the flat of his still revving axe.

  'No,' he says, savagely kind. This warrior and his doomed brethren fought well, and their father is careful to offer no humiliation in these last moments.

  His other sons, those loyal to him, are chanting his name, shouting it through the ruins. They chant the name his slave-handlers gave to him when he was Lord of the Red Sands. Angron. Angron. Angron. He does not know what name the Emperor had intended for him. He never cared enough to ask, and now the chance to do so is denied to
him forever.

  'Lord,' The dying centurion speaks.

  Angron crouches by his son, ignoring the nosebleed trickling down his lips as the Butcher's Nails tick, tick, tick in the back of his brain.

  'I am here, Kauragar.'

  The World Eater draws in a shivery breath, surely one of his last. His remaining eye seeks his primarch's face.

  'That wound at your throat,' Kauragar's words come with blood bubbling at his lips. 'That was me.'

  Angron touches his own neck. His fingers come away wet, and he smiles for the first time in weeks.

  'You fought well.' The primarch's low tones are almost tectonic. 'All of you did.'

  'Not well enough.' The centurion bares blood-darkened teeth in a rictus grin. 'Tell me why, father. Why stand with the Arch-traitor?'

  Angron's smile fades, wiped clean by his son's ignorance. None of them have ever understood. They were always so convinced that he should have been honoured by being given a Legion, when the life he chose was stolen from him the day the Imperium tore him away from his true brothers and sisters.

  'I do not stand with Horus.' Angron breathes the confession. 'I stand against the Emperor. Do you understand, Kauragar? I am free now. Free.

  Can you not understand that? Why have you all spent these last decades telling me I should feel honoured to live as a slave, when I was so close to dying free?'

  Kauragar stares past his primarch, up at the lightening sky. Blood runs from the warrior's open mouth.

  'Kauragar. Kauragar?'

  The centurion exhales - a slow, tired sigh. His chest does not rise again.

  Angron closes his dead son's remaining eye and rises to his feet.

  Chains rattle against his armour as he takes up his axes from the ground once more.

  Angron. Angron. Angron. His name. A slave's name.

  He walks through the ruins, enduring the cheers of his bloodstained followers - warriors concerned with glory and conquest, who were born better than the aliens and traitors they slay. Fighting their own kind is practically the first fair fight they have ever endured, and their gene-sire's lip curls at the thought.

  Before he was shackled by the Emperor's will, Angron and his ragged warband defied armies of trained, armed soldiers on his home world.

  They tasted freedom beneath clean skies and razed the cities of their enslavers.

  Now he leads an army fattened by centuries of easy slaughter, and they cheer him the way his masters once cheered when he butchered beasts for their entertainment.

  This is not freedom. He knows that. He knows it well.

  This is not freedom, he thinks as he stares at the World Eaters screaming his name. But the fight is only just beginning.

  When the Emperor dies under his axes, when his final thought is of how the Great Crusade was all in pathetic futility, and when his last sight is Angron's iron smile... Then the Master of Mankind will learn what Angron has known since he picked up his first blade.

  Freedom is the only thing worth fighting for.

  It is why tyrants always fall.

  ALL THAT REMAINS

  James Swallow

  THE DECK TILTED under my feet until I was walking like a crab, one foot on what used to be the floor, the other on what was the starboard-side wall. Gravity had become unusual, and it spread itself in peculiar patterns throughout the ship's corridors.

  Some strange artefact of the malfunctions, perhaps? I didn't know enough to tell. It's not where my expertise lies, but I imagined that if I could have seen it, the gravity would pile like drifts of snow blown into odd corners. Snow like we had at home, on Nomeah, before the melts and the ending.

  Flicking that thought away, I used the sconces in the walls as handholds, taking care to first beat out any flickering electro-candles with the butt of my lasrifle. The others kept pace behind me, and I could hear them all labouring their breaths in the cold, heavy air. I didn't need to turn to see the aura-light around their heads. I knew it would be unchanged: anger-red and terror-black.

  Without the ship's internal illumination, the only way we could navigate was by the sullen glow from the chamber at the far end of the corridor. Long shadows reached toward us, inky and fathomless. I felt as if I were some parasitic thing crawling up the throat of a dead host animal, questing for the open, fanged mouth.

  The noise of slow-twisting metals surrounded us as the ship was continually stressed and relaxed. I was no void-born, but I had ridden in starships on many occasions and I knew what sounded wrong. I knew the sound of something tested to breaking point. Something that was going to die.

  The thought fatigued me and I stopped to rest. I felt heavy and damp, as if I had been dragged through ice water; uniform, war-cloak, pack and all. The lip of a jammed hatch served as a temporary halt, and the others accepted it readily.

  Dallos sat closest to me and immediately had his cards out, his spindly pink fingers going over them. He worked the careworn rectangles of plas-paper with the rote deftness of a gambling sharp. The cards glinted, the print across their faces worn away in places where he had dealt and re-dealt them a thousand times. I could make out the faint numerals and the abstract geometric shapes of the suits.

  'Four of Emeralds,' he muttered, unaware of himself. Two of Hammers.'

  Dallos's face was half-hidden under a mask of dirty bandages. A monster had burned him, so I'd learned. The nimbus of a bolt of spewed fire had passed close to his unit, enough to torch the rest of the men in his mortar crew but not enough to kill him. What I could see of Dallos's face was pink like his hands, where he had beat out the backwash flames - as raw as his aura, and just as bright.

  Not a one of us was what you could call able. I think even the most generous of observers would have considered us to be a sorry collection of souls. Six men, clad in uniforms of the great Imperial Army, a scooping of poor bloody infantry from half a dozen different battalions all across the front line of the insurrection. We were the canis-facies, the sons of worlds ground up into chum by the inexorable machine of this new war. I think we all had badges of differing rank and status, but the memory evades. On the ship, it never mattered. No one was in charge, there was no chain of command. We simply were. Any intentions to salute or to snap to orders seemed pointless. A lot of things seemed pointless after all the horrors we had witnessed.

  But so we were. I had lost fingers on my fight hand - my off-hand, and so somehow I interpreted that as lucky - and taken shrapnel in my torso and thigh. The pieces were still in me, needles pricking me with each step I took. The small pains made me fired as much as they kept me awake. Dallos, as I said, was the burned man. Breng, with his skin the deep ebon of varnished wood, he showed the puckering and scarification of a gas attack victim. It was agony for him to speak, the poor fool's throat now a ruin, so he communicated as much through tilts of the head and hollow glares as he could. I think LoMund might have been an officer once, back when it mattered. That would explain the long white hair and the regal cut of his face, perhaps. That bit of him was broken, though. He had been belly-cut and spilled on the mud, saved only because blind panic and adrenaline had made him cup his own innards in his hands for long enough to stagger back to a safe zone. Then Chenec and Yao, each sallow of flesh with perpetually hooded eyes, both from the same world and both having been near-killed by claws and stubber fire.

  We were a small pack of walking wounded. I had not seen an uninjured man - and we were all men, for there were no females on this vessel - since we had disembarked from the rescue boat that bore me from Nomeah. The closest thing I had come across to the hale and whole were the lobotomised medicae servitors that prowled the ward decks, tending to the injured. If there were actual medics and chirurgeons on board this hulk, then they had not cared to turn their attention to us.

  There were so few of us, but what took my pause was that the ship was still full. The holds carried children. Refugee boys out of ruined families or from bombed-out scholaria, war orphans by the dozen. Sometimes we heard them
crying for their parents, for answers, for anything. It burned me, in a way, to admit that I was as lost as they were.

  This was one ship among several, or so I thought. In truth, I hadn't seen a porthole since we jumped into the screaming madness of the warp and fled the perfidy of the whoreson Warmaster. Whether or not the other craft were still out there, I didn't know. A few gunboats protecting bulk carriers packed to the gunwales with injured, our pathetic little convoy stopped here and there to pick up other contingents of the similarly injured. I had heard that some of the other vessels carried wounded Space Marines; was such a thing possible, I wondered? It seemed fanciful that any of the Imperium's immortal champions could ever suffer something so mundane as a mere wound.

  And so, in time none of us had the first clue as to where we were or to which points of the aetheric compass we were headed. The only constant was the lamentation of the almost-dead echoing through the cavernous wards as they fought nightmares in their sleep. That, and the sound of the engines.

  But after a time, I began to notice patterns. That's what I'm good at.

  I can see things.

  I don't speak of it much because it can frighten an unwary soul, and anger others into rash action. People don't like what they cannot understand, and they tend to react with violence over all else. In the ranks of the Imperial Army, that violence can come by blade or las-bolt, so it is conducive to a man's wellbeing not to go looking for it.

  The patterns - on ships like this, there's always a mix of the wounded, from those sad cases who would be better given the Emperor's Peace to the ones who are little more than malingerers. Not on this vessel, though. I saw that the injured here were all souls who could, if care were given, make it back to the front lines. In all the passage through the ship's labyrinthine interiors, I had not come upon one that could not have been healed to fight another day. Those more needy or less likely to survive had been transferred off when we docked or made rendezvous with other medicae ships in deep space. The ones who replaced them had faces of familiar cast.