Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  Dorn frowned, nodded. The Praetorian’s massive form was unarmoured: a yellow wool tunic, his dead father’s old, fur-edged robe, an overcloak of grey.

  ‘Is that… Is that why you are here?’ Sindermann asked. He wiped rain from his blow. ‘No.’

  ‘Your pardon. I’ll leave you to-‘

  ‘Sindermann, were you going to jump?’

  Sindermann looked up into the giant’s eyes. No lie could exist there.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I don’t think I was, after all.’

  Dorn sniffed. ‘It’s all right to be afraid,’ he said.

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  Dorn paused. Rain ran down his temples. It appeared he was actually considering the question, which Sindermann had regretted the moment it came out.

  ‘That’s a luxury I’m not permitted,’ he said at length.

  ‘Do you wish you were?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t…’ Dorn faltered. ‘I don’t know what it feels like. What does it feel like?’

  ‘I feel…’ Sindermann shrugged. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘I feel a biting at my throat. A pounding inflammation of my mind. I feel the limit of my ability, and yet I must give more. And I don’t know where that will come from.’

  ‘Then I think, if I may be so audacious as to say so, you are feeling afraid.’

  Dorn’s eyes widened slightly. He stared into the distance.

  ‘Really? That’s a very bold thing to say to me, Sindermann.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Sindermann. ‘I apologise. Thirty seconds ago I was intent on flinging myself from the parapet, so speaking truth to a lord primarch is not quite so daunting as perhaps it once might have been… Actually, that’s a lie. Now I think on it. Damn me, offending you is… more alarming than the prospect of my own death. I can’t believe I said that.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ said Dorn. ‘Fear… So that’s what it tastes like. Well, well.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ asked Sindermann.

  Dorn looked at him and frowned, as if he didn’t understand.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ Sindermann asked. ‘What are you really afraid of?’

  ‘Too many things,’ said Dorn simply. ‘Everything. For now, I’m simply afraid of the idea that I can, after all, know fear.’ He paused, then as an afterthought, ‘For Throne’s sake, don’t tell Roboute.’

  ‘I won’t, my lord.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You should tell him yourself.’

  Dorn looked at Sindermann.

  ‘You think I’ll get that chance?’ he asked. ‘That’s not the optimism of a man bent on ending his life.’

  ‘Further evidence, lord, that I was just up here enjoying the view,’ said Sindermann. ‘Is my optimism misplaced? Is your brother close yet? Do we know?’

  ‘We do not. I do not know if Guilliman or the Lion or any other loyal bastard is going to get here in time.’

  They fell silent. Rain drizzled around them.

  ‘What were you doing up here, lord?’ asked Sindermann. ‘Forgive me, but shouldn’t you be running this defence? At your post, data arrayed…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorn. ‘Seventy-eight hours straight, last shift, at Bhab Command, watching a thousand feeds scroll, implementing action and reaction. I-‘ he cleared his throat, ‘I find, iterator, as this onslaught wears on, it’s fruitful to step away. Just now and then. An hour alone here, or in the Qokang Oasis, to clear my head. To re-see what I have seen. It’s all in here…’

  He tapped his brow.

  ‘The data. Eidetic recall. I meditate, and process it as well as any strategium’s cogitation. Better, perhaps. New forms occur to me, new micro-strategies. I step away to rethink, and recompose. And I try to think, if I can, like my opponent. Like the bastard Lord of Iron, Perturabo. I consider the logic of his processes. In the meantime, the ongoing truth is never far away.’

  He showed Sindermann the noospheric-linked dataslate tucked in the pocket of his lobe.

  ‘I am sorry I disturbed you, lord.’

  ‘No need. A break or interruption is a healthy tool for thought breakthrough. Clarity through interruption. One can become too locked in. As in a blade light. A rhythm develops, a pattern, hypnotic. You win by breaking the pattern.’

  ‘Then I am glad to be of use,’ said Sindermann. ‘And glad that I did not find you intent on the same escape that brought me up the stairs.’

  Dorn eyed him.

  ‘I apologise for that suggestion too,’ said Sindermann.

  Dorn glanced at the parapet. ‘A thousand metres onto the roof of the West Constant? I doubt that would do the job.’

  ‘What would?’

  ‘One of my brothers, I would expect.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sindermann.

  ‘It was unthinkable,’ said Dorn softly. ‘We thought… We believed we could not be killed, until Manus fell. But that’s just history now.’

  They looked out at the burning horizon.

  ‘Have you given up on history?’ Dorn asked.

  ‘You heard that part, then?’ Sindermann said, embarrassed.

  ‘History eating itself? Yes.’

  ‘The Order of Remembrancers is long dissolved, by Council edict. Its purpose is curtailed. There is no formal programmeme. The late Solomon Voss’ great project is abandoned. No more illumination is needed, no more iterators required to articulate the truth of-‘

  ‘It was necessary to control the flow of ideas,’ said the Praetorian gently. ‘Fundamentally necessary, as a measure of security. The word of the enemy can be toxic. The idea of the treason is toxic. It is infectious. You know that.’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ said Sindermann.

  ‘Censorship is abhorrent to me,’ said Dorn. ‘It runs against the principles of the society we were meant to be building. Great Terra, I’m beginning to sound as high-minded as Guilliman. My point, Kyril, my point is… we’re not building any more, and we had no idea how words could contaminate everything we hold dear. Remembrancers. Theists. Ideas that, in better times, we might at least have gently humoured. I stand opposed to all that woman Keeler represents, butI would defend her right to say it. In better times. But words and ideas have become dangerous, Sindermann. I don’t have to explain that to you, of all people.’

  ‘I understand, I do,’ replied Sindermann with a shrug. ‘And what is there left to tell anyway? What words left to use?’

  ‘Sindermann,’ said Dorn. He paused.

  ‘ Lord?’

  ‘Find some.’

  ‘Some… what?’

  ‘Some words, and people to help you use them. The order may be gone, but I feel we need remembrancers now. More than before, maybe, and unofficially, perhaps. I would support the idea. To see the truth, to report it, to write it down.’

  ‘Why, lord?’

  Dorn fixed him with a steady gaze.

  ‘Historians toil at the past, but they write for the future. That’s the point of them. If I know there are historians still at work, it tells me there will be a future. I think that might strengthen my resolve. The idea of a future, a far future, that will exist and want to remember. It would fortify any purpose, and offer me hope. If the historians give up, then we’re admitting an end is coming. Go do the work the Emperor once gave you, and remind me that some future is still a possibility for us.’

  ‘I will, lord,’ said Sindermann. He swallowed hard, and pretended that the rain was in his eyes again.

  ‘If we win this,’ said Dorn, ‘it will be the greatest thing we ever do.’

  ‘It will,’ Sindermann agreed. ‘Yes, it will. For this is surely the greatest hell we have ever known. I think of the Palace as the solid heart of everything, yet wherever I go, I feel it tremble.’

  ‘Tremble?’

  ‘To the bedrock. The halls, the walls… I walk the place, you know. Every day, from line to line, within the defences and the bastions. I feel the vibration of t
he constant bombardment, the deluge of energy quaking the mantle, the sub-shock, the aftershock. I feel it everywhere.’

  ‘I’ve been told the entire Palace and the crust beneath has shifted eight centimetres west since this began,’ said Dorn.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Sindermann. ‘Well then. You see? The tremble is everywhere. I feel it here. At the Hasgard Gate, eight days ago, like an earthquake during that ion barrage. The casements shook. And yesterday, I walked the Saturnine Wall. Even there, a shudder underfoot, like there was palsy in the old stones. Shock, lord, transmitted kilometres through the dirt from the port warzones.’

  Dorn nodded. Then he went very still, his mind turning; considering, Sindermann was certain, more memorised data in one second than Sindermann could retain in a year.

  ‘Saturnine?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  Dorn turned. ‘I must return to my post. And so must you. Go down, remembrancer. Do your work so that mine can matter hereafter.’

  ‘I will, lord.’

  ‘Take the stairs, please.’

  Sindermann grinned. ‘Most amusing, lord.’

  ‘Laughing at this plight, and at ourselves,’ said Rogal Dorn, ‘may be the last thing we are able to do. When the munitions are all spent and our blood is leaked away, I will look our enemy in the eyes and laugh at his ghastly misunderstanding of the way things are meant to be.’

  ‘I will make a note of that, lord,’ said Sindermann.

  ONE

  * * *

  After the gate fell

  Begin

  Oath maker

  There’s a bond stronger than steel to be found in the calamity of combat.

  Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army) had found that out in the span of about a hundred days. They had met on the sixth of Secundus, in the crowds swarming off the Excertus Imperialis troop ships at the Lion’s Gate. Everyone tired and confused, lugging kit, gaping at the monumental vista of the Palace, which most had never seen before, except in picts. Officers shouting, frustrated, trying to wrangle troops into line; assembly squares outlined in chalk on the concourse deck, marked with abbreviated unit numbers; adjutants hurrying along the lines, punch-tagging paper labels to collars – code marker, serial, dispersal point – as if they were processing freight.

  ‘I swear I have never seen so many people in one place,’ Joseph had remarked.

  ‘Nor me,’ Willem had replied, because he’d been standing next to him.

  Just that simple. A hand offered, shaken. Names exchanged. Willem Kordy (3 3rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). The brackets were always there, with everybody. Your name became a sentence, an extension of identity.

  ‘Ennie Carnet (fourth Australis Mechanised).’

  ‘Seezar Filipay (Hiveguard Ischia).’

  ‘Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile). This is Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).’

  No one stopped doing it. It was too confusing otherwise. No one came from here, no one knew the place, or anybody except the rest of their unit. They brought their birthplaces, regions and affiliations with them, in brackets, like baggage trains after their names. Like comforting mementos. It became second nature. On the eleventh, Kordy found himself saying, as he reported to his own brigade commander, ‘Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile), sir.’

  ‘Colonel Bastian Carlo, Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mo- What the shit is wrong with you, soldier?’

  They lugged their brackets into the war with them, along with their packs and munition bags and their service weapons, like a little extra load. Then they had to cling to them, because once the fighting started, everything quickly lost definition and the brackets were all they had. Faces and hands got covered in mud and blood, unit badges got caked in dirt. By the twenty-fifth, the long red coats of the 77th Europa Max (Ceremonial) were as thick with filth as the green mail of the Planalto Dracos 6-18 and the silver breastplates of the Nord-Am First Lancers. Everyone became indistinguishable, alive or dead.

  Especially after the gate fell.

  Lion’s Gale space port fell to the enemy on the eleventh of Quintus It was a long way from where they were, hundreds of kilometres west. Everything was a long way from everything else, because the Imperial Palace was so immense. But the effects were felt everywhere, like a convulsion, like the Palace had taken a headshot.

  They were on the 14th Line by then, out in the north reach of the Greater Palace. The 14th Line was an arbitrary designation, a tactical formation of twenty thousand mixed Excertus and Auxilia units holding positions to guard the western approaches to the Eternity Wall space port. When the Lion’s Gate fell, cohesion just went, right across the 14th Line, right across everywhere. A series of heavy voids had failed, soiling the air in the surrounding zone with a lingering sting of raw static and overpressure. The aegis protecting the Palace had ruptured in a cascade, spreading east from the Lion’s Gate, and the electro-mag blink of that collapse took down vox and noospheric links with it. No one knew what to do.

  Commands from Bhab and the Palatine Tower were not updating. There was a mad scramble, a fall-back, evacuating dugouts and leaving the dead behind. Parts of the Lion’s Gate space port were on fire, visible from leagues away. Traitor armies were shoving in from the south east, emboldened by the news that the port had fallen. they were driving up the Gangetic Way unchecked, piling in across Kigaze Earthworks and the Haldwani Traverse bastions, swarming the enclosures at the Saratine and Karnali Hubs and the agrarian districts west of the Dawn Road. The units of the 14th Line could hear the rumble of approaching armour as they ran, like a metal tide rolling up a beach. The sky was a mass of low smoke, scored through by the ground-attack aircraft making runs on the port-side habitations.

  No one could believe that the gate had fallen. It was where they had all arrived, almost a hundred days before, and it had felt so huge and permanent. Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordfrik Resistance Army) had never seen a structure so magnificent. A vertical city that soared into the clouds, even on a clear day. Lion’s Gate. One of the principal space ports serving the Imperial Palace.

  And the enemy had taken it.

  That meant the enemy had surface access inside the Eternity Wall, inside the Anterior Barbican. It had the critical operational capacity to stall landing principal assault forces from the orbital fleet: heavy units, mass units, to reinforce the Terran traitor hosts that had begun the outer assaults.

  ‘No,’ Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) told his friend. ‘Not reinforce. Supplant. The first door of the Palace has opened.’ An orbital artery had begun to pump. Until then, they’d faced men and machines. Through the yawning hole of the Lion’s Gate, other things could now arrive, the way cleared for their advance.

  Traitor Astartes. Titan engines. And worse, perhaps.

  ‘How could there be worse?’ asked Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).

  They tried to make their way from Southern Freight Quadrant to Angevin Bastion, approaching the top end of the Gangetic Way where it crossed Tancred and the Pons Montagne, in the hope of skirting the traitor armour that was reducing Gold Fane Bastion to rubble. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) had nominal command, but they didn’t need a leader. It was move as one, in support of each other, or die.

  Some fled, discipline lost. They were cut down inside two hundred metres, or overtaken by the viral clouds. Others gave up. That was the worst thing to see. Anonymous troopers, their identities lost undei a film of grease and mud, no longer able to say their brackets, sitting in doorways, beside broken walls, in the stinking shadows of underpass revetments. A few put pistols in their mouths, or tugged the pins of their last grenades. But most just sat, ruined by despair and sleep deprivation, and refused to get up. They had to be left behind. They sat until death found them, and
it never took long.

  The rest, the still living, they tried to move. Vox and noospheric links remained dead. The constant flow of updating directives and deployment instructions had been choked off. They had to switch to Emergency and Contingency Orders, which had been issued on paper flimsies to all field officers. They were basic, spartan. For them, the units of the 14th Line, a curt general order written on a curl of paper, like a motto from a fortune cracker: ‘In the event of breach or failure at 14th, withdraw to Angevin.’

  Angevin Bastion and its six-kilometre line of casemates. Get behind that. That was the hope. A new line. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) had about seven hundred infantry with him in a long, straggling column that kept breaking into clumps. His seven hundred was just a small part of the eighty-six thousand loyalist Army personnel in retreat from Line 14, Line 15 and Line 18. Packs kept stumbling into each other as they struggled through the ruins, yell-ling names and brackets frantically to prevent mistaken engagement.

  Enemy fire was al least only coming from one direction: behind them.

  Then it began to come from the flank too. From the north. Close by and heavy, pricking through the colonnades and the gutted buildings, stippling rockcrete, raising puffs of powder-dust from rubble slopes.

  And killing people.

  Their line, their ragged column, began to crumple. Some scattered and brocke for cover, others turned, bewildered. Some fell, as though they were tired of standing up. They dropped heavily, like sacks of meat, and tilted at ungainly angles, their legs bent under them, poses only death could accomplish. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) started yelling above the chatter of weapons fire, urging them on to Angevin and a lew of the troopers obeyed.

  ‘He’s a fool,’ said Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). ‘My friend Willem, don’t go that way! Look, would you? Look!’

  The enemy had emerged. A wide, rolling line of traitor ground troops surged through the ruined fringes of Gold Fane, spilling through broken archways, and across streets, and down spoil heaps, flowing like water through every gap they could find. They were chanting. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) couldn’t make out what There was too much noise. But it was all one thing, voices lifted as one, a sound as ugly as the icons on the banners that wobbled and flapped over their ranks.