Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

‘He was indeed,’ agreed Ismael, ‘but Lukasz Król was once a good man, a man driven by faith in the Emperor to excesses of violence against the enemies of Mankind. But he began to see deviance and heresy everywhere he looked, and his bloody pogroms soon turned on his own people.’

  ‘Król?’ asked Totha Mu-32. ‘The Impaler Cardinal?’

  Abrehem shrugged. ‘I don’t know, maybe. I’ve never heard of the Impaler Cardinal.’

  ‘Few have,’ said Totha Mu-32, as he and Ismael set Abrehem down on his cot bed. ‘The Ecclesiarchy are understandably reluctant to admit to one of their own going insane. Some, like Vandire or Bucharis, are impossible to deny, but Król’s reign of atrocity was mercifully short-lived and confined to a single system.’

  ‘How do you know about him?’ asked Abrehem.

  ‘Król’s actions were recorded by the Mechanicus personnel who oversaw the dismantling of his bloody regime after an army of Adeptus Arbites led by Chastener Marazion brought him down. It makes for unpleasant reading, even to those who can detach themselves from empathy and physiological responses to revulsion. Now do you accept that no good can come of X-42’s emancipation?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Abrehem, pointing a shaking hand towards the dormis chamber. ‘Check the pacifier helm and seal that monster in there again. We can’t risk that any shred of Lukasz Król might still be in there.’

  ‘There will always be something of him in there,’ said Ismael, gently lowering Abrehem to the cot bed. ‘And that is the greatest tragedy.’

  A dreadful sadness and soul-crushing weariness settled upon Abrehem, but the memories of Król’s atrocities were already receding. Abrehem just hoped that in time they would fade completely. No-one needed horrors like that festering in their brain.

  ‘Rest now,’ said Ismael.

  Abrehem nodded, already feeling his eyelids growing heavy. He felt a blanket being pulled over him and rolled onto his side. It had been foolish of him to venture into the psyche of a mind-altered killer, but at least he knew that Rasselas X-42 would never hurt anyone ever again.

  ‘Shut it down,’ he murmured as exhaustion smothered him. ‘Shut it down forever and seal this place up so no one ever finds it again.’

  ‘I will see to it,’ Totha Mu-32 assured him.

  Roboute had always known the Speranza was a vast starship, he’d seen it from space and its inhuman scale was hard to miss. He’d berthed his ship within its cavernous holds, and he knew four god-machines of the Titan Legions, as well as thousands of Imperial Guard and skitarii, were billeted aboard – together with their armoured inventories and vehicles. He knew all this and more, thanks to reams of statistics provided by Magos Pavelka in awed, reverent tones.

  So why did he now feel claustrophobic, like a rat in a maze, desperately hunting for a way out?

  Ever since he’d brought the shuttle back aboard the Speranza he’d had an unidentifiable sense of being watched, that tingling at the back of the neck that tells a soldier a sniper has a bead on them. He had no evidence of this, but in the weeks since they had left Hypatia he’d felt like a helpless mammal being stalked by an invisible predator that could pounce at any time, but delayed the moment of the kill for anticipation’s sake.

  He’d taken to carrying his pistol with him at all times, even going as far as to keep the safety off, which continually chafed at his Ultramarian training. He took Adara with him at all times, even when traversing well-populated areas of the ship. Much of his time was spent helping Sylkwood and Pavelka repair the damage done to the Speranza and the shuttle or visiting Linya Tychon on the medicae decks.

  The Speranza had already passed the outer planets of the uncannily geometric system and would achieve orbit within another two days at most. No-one had yet named their destination, for if the Lost Magos was indeed alive and well on the forge world’s surface, it was likely he had already done so, and Archmagos Kotov was nothing if not a stickler for the proper taxonomy of planetary nomenclature.

  His days were filled with reading the myth-cycles of Ultramar to Linya and being hectored by Ilanna Pavelka at the terrible damage he and Emil had wreaked on the ship. When armpit-deep in the guts of a non-functional machine or lost in tales of the young Primarch Guilliman, he could almost forget the lingering presence that flitted around him like a persistent swampfly.

  Eventually, he tired of walking on brittle ice and decided he’d had enough of sitting in the cross-hairs. If there was someone watching him, it was high time he knew who it was. Roboute unbuckled his pistol belt and laid it on the rosewood surface of his desk before striding from the Renard. He randomly picked one of the embarkation deck’s exit archways and began walking. Each time he came to a junction of passageways, a stairwell or a processional convergence templum, he took the pathway that looked the least inviting or which had been scrubbed of all locational identifiers.

  Within minutes he was hopelessly lost within the warren of dimly lit passageways, mesh-walled and steel-floored. Steam gathered in the upper reaches of vaulted cloisters, and meltwater from ice filling the breaches between passageways and chambers partially open to the void ran in metallic gutters. He walked in darkness, in shadow and by the light of looming vent towers that belched flame into the heating systems.

  He marvelled at vast chambers of cog-driven pistons, each larger than a Warlord’s leg, roaring machines with connector rods and couplings that scissored back and forth like the arms of a threshing machine or the oars of an ancient trireme of Macragge. The few tech-priests he saw largely ignored him, or steered him away from areas of high radiation or some other danger of which he was clearly unaware.

  Wandering through row upon row of titanic cylindrical towers like grain silos, he tasted the greasy tang of bulk foodstuffs, and realised he was looking at the Speranza’s food supplies. Roboute walked along a raised walkway between the towers, coming at last to a chamber filled with noxious smells and eye-watering caustic vapours. Three dozen enormous vats, two hundred metres across, stretched into the distance, each filled with a grey-brown sludge of reclaimed matter, meat substitutes, protein pastes and complex carbohydrate additives.

  Servitors on repulsor discs floated over the viscous mulch, plunging sample staves into the deep strata or removing contaminants. The sight sickened Roboute and he left the chamber, taking turns at random and always picking a route that had no markings to indicate where it might lead.

  The feeling that there was a target on his back or that a noose was slowly closing on him was getting stronger, and he had to fight the urge to spin around and try to catch a glimpse of his pursuer. Whoever or whatever had its eye on him would make itself known to him soon enough.

  He passed shrines to the Omnissiah, to the Emperor and to things he couldn’t identify. Some appeared to be little more than votive offerings to some avatar that might charitably be considered an aspect of the Machine-God, while others were too disturbing to be connected to the Cult Mechanicus.

  Some were clearly intended as little more than petty rebellions, where others were of a more sinister appearance, with items hung from the ad-hoc arrangements that Roboute didn’t want to look at too closely. Others appeared to be newly-erected shrines to Abrehem Locke and his apostles: the Red Ruin, the Angel Return’d, Blessed Hawke and Coyne of the Wound.

  Roboute shook his head at the ridiculousness of these latter shrines, having heard Ven Anders and Captain Hawkins tell him the truth about Abrehem Locke’s compatriots. But wherever men and women were confined without hope, they would make their own. Even in the darkest times, the human mind was capable of fashioning its own light.

  He passed beneath a towering lancet archway and entered a long processional nave filled with statuary: robed adepts of the Cult Mechanicus arranged in two facing rows running the length of the chamber. Each was around ten metres tall and their projecting surfaces were thick with dust, as were the interlinked hexagonal tiles of the floor. Roboute remembered when he had first come aboard the Speranza, and Magos Blaylock had escorted
them to Archmagos Kotov in the Adamant Ciborium. The statues there had been toweringly magnificent, sculptural likenesses of the greatest minds of the Mechanicus.

  Who were these figures?

  Were they men and women whose contributions had been outmoded or surpassed?

  A deep sadness filled Roboute as he walked slowly between the statues of the forgotten magi, wondering why this place was now unvisited and abandoned. He paused beside a robed priest of Mars and looked up into the shadows beneath the hood.

  ‘Who were you?’ asked Roboute, the echoes of his voice swallowed by the centuries of dust. ‘And what did you do? Someone thought you were important enough to warrant a statue.’

  The statue stared across the chamber impassively, and Roboute knelt beside the carved plaque on its plinth and wiped away the dust.

  ‘Magos Vahihva of Pharses,’ said Roboute. ‘The rest of the ship may have forgotten you, but I’ll remember you. I’ll find out who you were and I’ll make sure I remember it. I know the Mechanicus say they never delete anything, but not deleting something isn’t the same as remembering it.’

  Roboute stood and looked up at the unknowable face of Magos Vahihva as an overwhelming sense of calm spread through him. He smiled and ran a hand through his hair, before straightening his jacket and brushing stray particles of dust from his cuffs.

  ‘About bloody time you showed yourself,’ he said.

  ‘You were aware of my presence?’ said a voice with a breathy, lyrical quality he hadn’t heard for many years. He closed his eyes as he turned around, savouring the cadences of the voice as it defied the chamber’s acoustics and resonated throughout its length.

  ‘I was, but only because I’ve been around your people before,’ said Roboute, finally opening his eyes. ‘I hope this encounter is as pleasant and non-violent as the last.’

  A woman in armour that looked to have been crafted from ceramic and alabaster stood opposite him. She was tall, with a leanness to her frame that was both beguiling and somehow at odds with how his brain told him a woman’s body ought to be proportioned. A helmet with horns like antlers sat on the plinth of the statue behind her, and he couldn’t help but notice the polished pistol strapped to her thigh and the long, bejewelled sword sheathed at her shoulder.

  ‘I am not going to kill you,’ she said.

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ replied Roboute with what he hoped was his most winning smile. He’d essentially engineered this meeting, though only now did he truly understand the tantalising sense of familiarity he’d felt on the embarkation deck.

  The eldar woman’s face was sculpturally perfect, a pleasingly proportioned oval with large eyes and a tousled mass of scarlet hair entwined with glittering stones and golden beads. Her lips were a pleasing shade of blue, but pursed together in a way that made her seem inordinately angry.

  In fact, now that he looked closely, he saw her apparently expressionless face was in fact taut with suppressed rage, an icy fury that simmered just beneath the surface. Despite her earlier words, Roboute suddenly doubted the wisdom of this course of action. He took a faltering step back towards Magos Vahihva as she approached him with a liquid fluidity that left no trace of her passing in the dust.

  ‘You are Roboute Surcouf,’ she said, not posing the words as a question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have spent time aboard an eldar craftworld.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stopped in front of him as he backed up against Magos Vahihva’s plinth. Her breath was a contradictory mix of warm honey and sharp lemon. ‘You understand how rare it is for one of your kind to set foot on a craftworld?’

  Finally, a question.

  ‘Yrlandriar of Alaitoc told me that, yes.’

  ‘Alaitoc? Yes, that makes sense,’ she said, cocking her head to the side and looking at him strangely, as though some part of a puzzle had just fallen into place for her. ‘Its people have always been foolishly trusting. Too eager to seek the middle ground instead of choosing a direct course of action.’

  ‘You know me,’ said Roboute, daring a question of his own, ‘but who are you?’

  ‘Bielanna Faerelle, Farseer of Craftworld Biel-Tan,’ she said, following that with what sounded like the opening bars of a song until Roboute realised she was saying the name in her native tongue. He ran the sounds in his head again and compared them to the human version of the name she’d said, dredging up memories of frustrating afternoons spent in a forest of crystal trees that looked oddly like humanoid figures.

  ‘Fairest light of… distant suns?’ he ventured.

  Her eyes widened and he laughed at the surprise in her eyes.

  ‘We’re not all barbarians, you know,’ he said. ‘Some of us actually wash too.’

  Bielanna ignored his sarcasm and said, ‘Did the Alaitocii teach you our language?’

  ‘Yrlandriar taught me a few words here and there,’ said Roboute modestly. He was far from fluent, but nor was he ignorant of the rudiments of eldar language.

  ‘Like an owner teaches his pet the commands to sit or beg,’ said Bielanna.

  Anger touched Roboute. ‘More like a master instructing a novice,’ he said in conversational eldar.

  She laughed in derision and shook her head. ‘None of your kind can master the eldar language beyond grunting a few basic phrases. And your analogy is flawed, it infers the novice could go on to become a master. That is not the case.’

  ‘I’ve heard differently,’ said Roboute, tiring of her condescension and deciding a change of tack was required. ‘Why did you attack our fleet in the Halo Scar?’

  Her face changed in an instant, her slender fingers curled into fists.

  ‘What choice did I have?’ she snarled, her porcelain doll features transforming from serene beauty to bilious anger in a heartbeat. ‘I flew the paths of the skein and saw what harm your foolish quest might wreak.’

  Roboute struggled to follow her internal logic. ‘You’re saying you killed our ships over something we might do?’

  Bielanna shook her head and let out a vexed hiss. ‘You mon-keigh are so terrifyingly ignorant of the nature of causality it is a wonder you have not already plunged into species-extinction. You blunder through space like a wilful child who screams and wails when the universe does not bend to his will, turning a blind eye to consequences that displease you.’

  Glitter light built in her eyes and Roboute remembered Yrlandriar telling him that farseers were powerful war-psykers, as versed in the arts of death as they were in the arts of prognostication. Once again, Roboute realised he had let the appearance of a woman blind him to the truth that she was not what she seemed. In Linya’s case that had cost him a little embarrassment and earned him a measure of humility. Here it could kill him.

  ‘What is it you think we are going to do?’ he asked.

  She sighed and said, ‘It would be like explaining a symphony to a ptera-squirrel.’

  ‘Try me, I’m cleverer than I look.’

  ‘This thing that you seek,’ said Bielanna. ‘It can reignite dying stars and shape entire star systems. Its power can unmake time and space and make a mockery of the universal dance. Do you really think your upstart race of savages is ready to be the custodians of such a thing?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Roboute. ‘But if it’s so dangerous, why don’t you just go and get it yourself or destroy it if it’s too dangerous to exist?’

  Her fractional hesitation was all the answer he needed.

  ‘After the battle in the Halo Scar, the shipmasters thought you’d escaped, but you didn’t, did you?’ said Roboute. ‘Your ship must have been destroyed and you had to board the Speranza to escape. You’re the ones that have been killing the work crews below the waterline.’

  ‘Your reckless quest into the unknown has cost eldar lives, so why should I care for the lives of their killers? Why should meaningless flicker-souls be of any consequence to me, when your kind are going to murder my children before they are born?’

&nb
sp; Roboute endured her venom though he understood little save her anger. Much of it was the bitter spite attributed to the eldar in Imperial propaganda, but her last words stretched his understanding to breaking point.

  ‘Kill your… what?’ he asked. ‘We haven’t killed any children.’

  ‘Nor will you, for the potential for their birth is fading,’ said Bielanna. ‘With every second you travel towards this moraideiin world, their life-thread from the future to the present grows ever fainter.’

  ‘Moraideiin? I don’t know what that means. You mean Telok’s forge world?’

  ‘Telok, is he one of your machine-men?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  Her face flickered, and on any human expression it would have been meaningless – a muscular spasm or a nervous tic – but in the face of an eldar it was tantamount to a murderer’s inadvertent admission of guilt.

  Suddenly it made sense to Roboute. ‘You’re a farseer, but you don’t have any power, do you? It’s this whole region of space and the Breath of the Gods. Something in what it did to Arcturus Ultra is stopping you from seeing the future, isn’t it?’

  She moved so quickly it was like a skipping image on a picter. One minute she was standing before him, the next he was pinned to Magos Vahihva’s plinth with her hand at his chest and her sword at his neck. Phosphor-bright will-o’-the-wisp danced in her oval pupils, and Roboute tasted the bitter, ashen-cold taste of psychic energy in his mouth as it filled with coppery saliva.

  ‘Will I show you what power I have?’ she asked, her voice stripped of its previously lyrical quality and all the more terrifying for it. ‘Shall I burn the primitive brain in your skull or curse your soul to wander the void for eternity? Will I melt the flesh from your bones with balefire or shall I simply cut your throat and watch you bleed to death? I can end your life in the blink of an eye, and you say I have no power?’

  Roboute held his breath as Bielanna’s eyes bored into him, the hypnotically bright sparks in her eyes swelling until they shone like twin pools of starlight.

  ‘Reveal to me everything you know of this Telok,’ commanded Bielanna, and Roboute felt her presence within his skull like a silk-gloved hand stroking the surface of his mind. ‘You will tell me everything regarding this voyage. And then you will return to your fellow mon-keigh and forget that we ever spoke.’