by Ian Watson
What did such numbers mean? They were meaningless. Lexandro chuckled. Marines as a mass were invincible. “I still suspect you of deviancy, Tundrish.”
“And I suspect you of perversity,” Tundrish replied.
“You’re both so alien to what we seek to protect,” protested Valence.
“I think superhuman is the word you’re seeking,” said Tundrish. “Yet without Him on Earth, and without the heritage of our primarch, what would we be?”
“We’d be murderers,” whispered Valence. “Sanctified murderers.”
“Now that is high heresy,” said Lexandro.
“No, it’s squeamishness,” sneered Tundrish.
“There must,” said Valence, “be an ultimate justice beyond this savage galaxy. Wherein, I assure you, I shall be as steadfast as any, in quest of that truth. And as ruthless, and as clever. There must be justice.”
The three sons of Trazior went their separate ways to their cells, each thinking their separate thoughts.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CADETS RECEIVED their melanchromic organ, which henceforth would monitor radiations bombarding their skin and darken it protectively.
Then, during a single operation, the surgeons of the Apothecarion implanted the oolitic kidney and the Neuroglottis. In conceit with their second heart, this kidney could perform high-speed detoxification, while the Neuroglottis honed the sense of taste, specifically with regard to poisons – a fitting partner for the Preomnor and the Omophagea. Progressively the cadets were approaching the transhuman condition of Rogal Dorn, though they would never equal their primarch.
“And after the Venerable Dorn had rescued the mutilated, charred living corpse of the Emperor in the wake of that direst of victories against the renegade Horus,” declaimed moon-faced Chaplain Lo Chang in chapel; “and after he had overseen the construction of the Golden Throne, guided by the Emperor’s mighty spirit as He lay in life-support; and after Rogal Dorn had witnessed the transfer of that unquenchable divine husk into the Great Psychoprosthetic Throne, afterwards our primarch lived for another four hundred and thirteen years…”
The Chaplain’s face was as round as a moon. A sweat of devout ecstasy beaded it, the moist sheen reflecting the light of the many electrocandles – moonlike and radiantly, so it seemed to his congregation. Like a moon, too, his cheeks were cratered where his helmet had been riven during some fierce engagement, and those craters were scarred by subsequent duelling nicks.
And the Deeds of Rogal Dorn thereafter compose an entire hagiography, which we will now start to consider in detail – commencing with our primarch’s role in the expulsion of the renegade Iron Warriors from the Human Imperium into the forbidden zone known as the Eye of Terror, a region about which we speak softly if at all.
Such history…
History layered upon history in almost geological strata, within the levels of which were preserved corpse upon corpse upon corpse – so that the upheaving rockface of history seemed a veritable conglomerate of compressed cadavers, human, abhuman, and alien, a cosmos-spanning coral reef composed of innumerable crushed skeletons…
PRESENTLY CAME THE implant of the mucranoid gland, which would – if suitably drug-triggered – secrete oily protective sweat that could resist searing heat and bitter cold.
Eventually, during a sacred ceremony in the Apothecarion, the cadets received the progenoid glands in their necks and deep in their chests. Henceforth they were true custodians of the Imperial Fists’ greatest treasure. From now on, their bodies were temples indeed.
Almost five years had passed since their arrival at the home-base. Necromunda seemed almost as remote as childhood. How long ago it seemed since Sergeant Huzzi Rork had told Lexandro that he might return home again in twenty years, in thirty years, if the Fists so wished. Home? Home? What did that mean? Whilst Necromunda could not conceivably have changed, it would nevertheless seem as alien as any of the worlds that they might visit in the interim.
The Crusade was still awaiting the Emperor’s will. The Imperium thought in terms of decades, even centuries. Yet by now battle-brothers were as mastiffs straining on the leash; and it began to seem that the cadets might become Scouts in time to participate in the great endeavour, should they be so fortunate.
The ultimate implant remained; and one day Lexandro was opened up surgically – superficially and for the final time – to insert the sheets of black tissue beneath his skin.
Within hours, while he itched and writhed, the tissue was beginning to expand within him, hardening externally, invading his nervous system with internal tendrils.
It would be many more months till the carapace matured into full symbiotic harmony with his body – and of course his spirit must be tested and tempered in combat before sockets would be cut into the carapace, whereby he could plug himself into power armour in a full fusion of man and equipment. Yet already he was cadet no more. Now he could be initiated one vital stage further into the cult of Dorn.
Within days – after a feast of raw, bloody meat, still warm from slaughter – the Brother-Reclusiarch, custodian of the cult, led the ex-cadets in solemn procession into the looming vaulted trophy-hung hall of the Assimularum. Skulls of aliens adorned the banner-hung, tapestried walls, their eyeless sockets forever blinded to the mysteries of those who had mastered them, their hollow craniums empty of even the ghost of a twisted, unhuman thought.
The great ancient enamelled screen emblazoned with the Fists’ defence of the Imperial Palace against armoured rebel Titans had been moved aside, to reveal the Reclusiam itself. Many brothers stood within in meditative attendance beneath pieces of the actual glorious armour of the primarch, guarded there for millennia.
For the first time the new initiates beheld the inner chapel, of cloudy veined marble, to the Emperor Deified – vermilion threads in the milky crystalline limestone were like His agonised psychic sendings that pierced the veils of luminous nebulae.
Directly opposite was the inner chapel to Rogal Dorn, crafted of blocks of compressed sulphurous amber divided by striations of lapis lazuli – and housing the Fists’ holiest relic: the mighty skeleton, embedded in clear amber contoured to body-form, of the primarch himself.
The initiates all kneeled, staring at those great bones within that jaundiced false-fossil resinous flesh. At a signal from the Reclusiarch the lights dimmed, all but one bright narrow shaft descending aslant from a hole in the centre of the stellar vault as though it were liquid starlight. The beam illuminated an altar carved from a block of solid jade, where a knife and a whisk and a chalice were laid upon cloth of gold. From behind that altar the Reclusiarch lifted an oval convex mirror, framed by the spinal column of some alien bent into a hoop around it, the knobbly vertebrae enchased with potent runes. Intoning a liturgy, he tilted that silvered glass so that reflected light sprang at the skeleton, bathing it. The amber promptly fluoresced – a bilious olive hue, so that the mock-flesh appeared alive again, though gangrenous. The primarch’s dead limbs were momentarily restored, albeit clad in a semblance of translucent rotting tissue. Complete, except in one respect…
“Mani manent cum nostris semper in aeternum, Primarche,” the Reclusiarch chanted in the hieratic religious tongue, which his listeners only comprehended to be a blend of sacred plainsong and occult invocation. “Interficere est orare, Primarche.”
Then he turned and translated into Imperial Gothic:
“Thy hands remain with us always, primarch. To slay is to pray.”
The primarch’s hands were missing…
As soon as the Reclusiarch moved to restore the mirror to its hook, the fluorescence of the amber faded. Now he lifted the whisk and moved to flick the stiff little brush with swift, sure gestures over the casing of the demi-divine dead paladin, commencing at his massive shoulders, descending reverently to his feet, almost as if dusting him – yet with quite a different consequence. For the shorn hairs on the head of every initiate, and on any other hirsute parts of their bodies, prickled and sto
od on end, as though an electrifying ghost briefly shared their body-space with them.
Restoring the brush to the altar, the Reclusiarch lifted the sharp little knife and the chalice. He knelt before Dorn and held up the knife.
The primarch’s hands were both missing… Genuflecting, the Reclusiarch carved generous parings of amber from one toe, then another, dropping these into the chalice. Rising, he turned to the initiates and raised that cup, now glowing. Effervescence was occurring within. Aromatic white fumes arose from bubbling oil of amber.
“Respire corpus memoria! Breathe the memory of my flesh!”
As he bore the hot chalice along the row of initiates, so each in turn inhaled a heady, strangely fragrant whiff. Fresh molten amber must be added subsequently to the shaved toes to replenish what was taken – unless, unless the amber grew of its own accord like veritable flesh due to the miraculous proximity of those bones.
When the Reclusiarch passed back again, each initiate must hold out his middle finger, pointing stiffly forward from his fist. That little knife slashed sharply, circumcising the very tip of the digit, and even before the Larraman cells could clot – or perhaps because the blade was treated with some special anticoagulant – a sprinkling of bright blood fell like rubies from each fingertip to mingle in the chalice.
Lifting the chalice to his lips, the Reclusiarch drank the potion of hot amber oil blent with blood.
“Ego vos initio in Pugnorum Imperialorum fraternitate, in secundo grado,” he sang out. “And after you return from your first expedition as Scouts,” he promised, “other secretions from your body will be blent in this same chalice of the primarch – which was once His very drinking cup! – during your induction into the third degree of Brotherhood; though that in itself will only be the superficies of the third degree ceremony…”
The lights brightened.
Where were the primarch’s hands…?
Upon the marble wall to each side of the altar were mounted two sizable ormolu shrines, the double doors of which depicted ancient, angular types of Marine armour.
The Reclusiarch threw one set of doors open, then the other.
In transparent stasis-cases within, with magnilenses inset, hung Rogal Dorn’s fleshless fists, entire, scrimshandered with intricately wrought tiny miniatures of heraldic honours.
“It is the privilege of the commander of our Chapter alone to inscribe his heraldry as minutely as he can upon these sacred bones,” declared the Reclusiarch.
Even so, much of the available surface area of each bone was etched.
Thousands of years of commanders, thousands of years of tradition…
What a chasm of time – and duty.
Space yet remained on Dorn’s hands for a future Lord Commander Lexandro d’Arquebus to add his own future heraldry…
The Reclusiarch anointed each initiate with chrism, the sacred ointment, on the brow. Then he began to recite a litany of the individual bones and of the past commanders who had held this fortress-monastery for the Emperor.
“Whenever you flex your fingers, think of these! Whenever you ball your fist around your weapon, these names are all wrapped in your fist to add the strength of adamantium to your blow, the power of all the Sons of Dorn! Hand sinister, first metacarpal: the Lords Bronwin Abermort, Maximus Thane, Kalman Flodensbog. Proximal phalanx of thumb: Ambrosian Spactor…”
The litany droned on hypnotically.
PERHAPS THE STRANGEST talisman – and one (or should one say many…?) which made those initiates feel themselves intimately a part of the Fists – was kept in a long crypt below the Reclusiam, reached by a dropshaft which would incinerate anyone who did not sport a Black Carapace beneath their skin.
The adamantium floor down there was inscribed with a maze of tiny coloured channels that bootsteps would never be able to wear away – in a pattern suggestive of a cosmic map – and along all of those channels were spaced little indentations the depth of a Fist’s thumbprint, each recess named with a rune. At one end of this seemingly arcane map or game-board an enormous plascrystal bowl held thousands of what at first sight appeared to be bloodshot ochreous eyeballs.
Each ball commemorated the initiation of a group of ex-cadets, throughout the aeons – each being a nugget of the liquid amber and blood drunk from Rogal Dorn’s own chalice by the Reclusiarch of whichever epoch, and defecated by him subsequently in this shape.
At the opposite end of the graven floor, a second mighty bowl held darker balls, composed no doubt of the bodily secretions of the third degree likewise embalmed in amber.
What sacred game was played out on this floor? What arcane divinations were performed here? What horoscopy or even psychic sorcery in extremis might be enacted in this crypt? The initiates already realised that here were secrets unutterable outside the confines of the Reclusiam – innermost secrets which they themselves might wish never to know.
In the most organic, visceral way possible they now felt bonded with utter intimacy to their Chapter, digested by it.
AS A PLEASANT coda to that solemn and eerie initiation, they were invited to witness a duel.
Two battle-brothers, who had previously fasted in the Solitorium, confronted one another in the Arena Restricta, a barrel-vaulted hall painted a rich deep Prussian blue chevroned with stylised blood-red lightning flashes. The floor was a metal chequerboard of those two hues. On a red square, and on a blue, still some distance apart, stood two pairs of black leather knee-boots mounted in gleaming steel blocks. Around the walls on hooks hung antique epees, foils, sabres, and daggers, as well as stone drinking steins decorated with double-headed eagles, fylfots, and tusked boars’ heads.
A score of brother witnesses sat on elevated thrones quaffing from other such steins, brought by servitors. The soon-to-be Scouts sat on high benches, and were likewise served a bitter foaming brew, the potency of which their Preomnor stomach should swiftly detoxify. A cloaked umpire, helmeted for impartial anonymity, sat by a notator machine in the design of a giant vampire bat’s head with glowing red eyes; its ear-aerials wove an ultrasonic web recording every movement within the central arena.
Lexandro toasted Valence and Tundrish, sitting to his left.
“Do you remember the zestfulness of Chartreuse Julep, iced and minted?” The intoxicant had stirred a memory.
“Of course not,” retorted Valence. “How should I? Does this remind you of some long-lost luxury?”
Tundrish said slyly, “Maybe he imagines that if he becomes an officer, he will regain his old privileges. Yet Lord Pugh despises sensual gratification so much, I hear, he had his taste buds excised. His every feast is also a fast for his senses.”
Valence nodded, as if in conspiracy with Tundrish.
“That was a private penance – because a hundred and seventy Marines were lost in one terrible action, and because the Emperor cannot taste or smell or touch.”
“I do rather wonder about that,” drawled Lexandro. “If it’s private, how do people know? Legends have a habit of springing up.” Was he light-headed, despite his second stomach, after several years of abstinence? Was the old sardonic Lexandro reasserting himself during this lull of relaxation? Was a perverse sense of jovial community with his two Trazior cousins affecting him? Was he perhaps viewing them hallucinatorily as fellow Lordly Phantasms about to behold a fight between mind-slaves, between living puppets operated by the spectators?
“Beware of blasphemy!” Valence advised barbedly – exactly as Lexandro had once advised him.
All of a sudden Lexandro’s free hand gripped Valence’s wrist with a power which would have crushed any ordinary bones. Had Lexandro realised his error? How had he misidentified Tundrish and Valence for a moment? The light of Dorn shone in his eyes.
“Never accuse me of blasphemy, even as a jest! A Fist must be accurate. Scrupulously accurate. That was the reason for my remark. And as to my previous remark, I was merely attempting familiarity. As a courtesy. Alas, what a waste of time.”
“
A waste of time, of course,” said Valence. “Since clearly you are inherently superior. But now, would you kindly remove your hand from mine?”
Lexandro snatched his hand away – as though he had not even known that he had gripped his neighbour.
“Or else,” chipped in Tundrish, “you’re liable to provoke duels for the wrong reasons.”
Lexandro stared intensely, almost blindly, at Tundrish. This was the gaze of someone staring past any human being whatever, at some imaginary blazing sun beyond. “I am with Dorn,” he murmured. Two hearts were in his body now. Were there also two separate minds within him? An old upper-hab mind, lurking in hiding behind the new Fist mind? As though hypnotised, paralysed – for the most part – yet still impishly unregenerate… and nostalgic, even?
“So will you too become a legend?” Tilting his stein dismissively, Tundrish tipped out some brew as a derisive libation. A servitor hastily scuttled to wipe up the spillage.
Lexandro said nothing. He gazed at an ineffable, agonising radiance which only he could perceive, banishing whatever throwback emotions the brew had triggered. Then he switched his attention to the impending duel.
Two brothers had mounted those duelling blocks, stepping into those boots encased in heavy steel. Stripped to the waist, the contours of their musculature were faintly graven with decades-old surgical scars. Ever so faintly. Indeed, only Occulobe-enhanced eyesight could perceive such traces of the medical sculpting which had once made them Marines, as if the thinnest of pink veins wended across their bulging rock-hard melanchromic flesh, like a tracery in some golden marble which could become ochre-brown, which could become jet-black. Protective monocles were squeezed into the orbits of the combatants’ eyes.
They saluted the cloaked umpire with their thin tungsten epees; then one another. The umpire invoked and activated some instruments attached to the notator machine, then the steel blocks glided forward to within two squares of one another – epee range – and locked magnetically to the floor. One square’s separation would have been dagger range.
