Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  ‘To show respect,’ he replied.

  ‘Who are you kneeling to?’ Always so insistent, so curious.

  He shrugged. He had laid out two blades. Rubio’s sword looked dull in the candlelight. The force sword’s blade was inactive. It was an old Ultramarines weapon, gladius-pattern, a form he was familiar with. It still had the Ultima mark on the hilt.

  The Mk IV long-pattern chainsword beside it had a dent across the cowling and several teeth that needed to be re-set or replaced. A repair unit stood ready, beside the frame supporting his plate. The pale gray of the battered armour segments was the colour of old bone in the gloom, like a moon catching only back-scattered sunlight.

  ‘Kneeling is an act of respect or fealty,’ she remarked. ‘Or it is an act of reverence and devotion.’

  ‘It’s not devotion,’ he said. becoming annoyed at her interrupting and her questions. ‘There are no gods. We burned that lie.’

  ‘Then fealty… but there is no one here to kneel to, so the fealty is worthless.’

  ‘The Emperor is everywhere.’

  ‘Is He?’ She looked amused. ‘You kneel to the idea of Him, as an act of faith? So which is it, fealty or devotion? Have you destroyed false gods just to build another?’

  ‘He is not false,’ he snapped. The floor shook briefly. Dust sifted down from the trembling ceiling. The closest batteries and casemates had resumed firing, and their mass recoil was flexing the fabric of the Palace.

  ‘Is He a god, then?’ she asked. She brushed away dust that had fallen onto the pauldrons of his racked armour.

  ‘There are daemons now, so…’ he began.

  ‘So there must be gods too?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. What do you want, Mersadie?’

  ‘To live. Too late for that now.’

  The candles guttered.

  What oath are you making? Loken imagined her asking. He wondered how he would explain. Oaths of moment were just that – specific, taken before battle. All those he had sworn, almost everything he had ever sworn apart from his devotion to the Emperor, had long been voided. He had decided to make his own, a crude and simple oath, enough to keep him going through whatever part of his life remained.

  ‘I’ve seen slogans daubed on walls, in the lower parts of the Palace Precinct,’ he said to the empty cubicle. ‘A few to begin with, then more. I think the Imperial Army garrisons and conscripts scrawl them up. A mantra. I adopted it as my oath. Simple. Encompassing, and easy to remember, lust three words’

  He showed the scrap of parchment to the empty air, to the ghost memory of her presence.

  To the death.

  TWO

  * * *

  Theory versus execution

  Angels among us

  Only human

  To see the Lord of Iron at work, that was a thing. A mighty thing There was only one other mind in the known galaxy that could orchestrate mass war like him, and that mind was behind the monolithic walls they were trying to tear down. Well, one or two minds, Ezekyle Abaddon thought. One or two, maybe three. And one of them might be standing here on the platform watching him work. But give the Lord of the IV his due. He had a true flair for it.

  The others were about to push ahead and approach, but Abaddon raised his hand to stay them.

  ‘What?’ asked Horus Aximand. ‘Afraid we might break the bastard’s train of thought? Balls up his plans?’

  Tormageddon chuckled. There was little love lost between the Mournival and the Lord of Iron. The war had spilled too much bad blood. But these things had to be set aside, for the time being at least. There was one, unifying goal to be accomplished, and the Lord of Iron was master of the battle sphere.

  ‘Take more than the sight of you to derail his concentration,’ Falkus Kibre told Little Horus. The Widowmaker paused, and sneered at Aximand. ‘I don’t know, though…’

  ‘Just shut up,’ said Abaddon quietly. ‘I wanted to watch him work. For a moment. It’s a thing. A mighty thing.’

  His Mournival brothers shrugged and indulged him. They stood and watched with him.

  A formidable lifter throne had been brought onto the platform. The Iron Circle, six towering battle-automata that never left Perturabo’s side, stood watch around it, impossibly still and alert. Forgebreaker, the Iron Lord’s colossal warhammer, stood head down on a grav-pad beside the throne.

  From the lifter-throne’s broad arms and footrest, hololith plates were mounted on sooty servo-arms, surrounding him on three sides: left, right and ahead. Eighteen active screens, streaming with data, flashing with quick-cut pict-cap images from the fields below. The Lord of Iron was lit by their glow, immersed. He sat hunched, an ogre sheathed in massive, matt-anthracite metal plate that looked as though it could withstand a siege all on its own. The cold plate seemed to be perspiring a sheen of gun oil. Servo-cables and feeder-pipes laced his skull like roped plaits, covering his ears, sprouting from his neck, cheeks and chin. Precious little of his face remained visible. The mass of cables gave him the look of Medusa from old lore, writhing serpent-haired.

  His head twitched, darting from screen to screen. His fingers scuttled across the throne’s haptic surfaces, adjusting, deleting, moving, impelling.

  Writing history, touch by touch.

  Perturabo, Lord of Iron, twelfth-found son, stepchild of Olympia, primarch of the IV Legion, devisor of war, master of the art of attack, leveller of walls, demolisher of fortresses, unmaker of worlds.

  Siege-war was his craft, his genius. Il had got them that far, through the bulwarks of the best defended planetary system in realspace, through the orbital defences of the most secure world anywhere, and in through these walls, to his genefather’s doorstep. Perturabo could see the entire micro-detail of the theatre all at once, but through the screens around him and the feeds in his head. He was oblivious to the actual world, to the view just a few meters away from where he sat. It was quite a view, Abaddon reflected. My Lord Perturabo, the twelfth primarch, is so buried in his work, he’s really missing something. A fine view on a day like this. But that was probably why he was so good at what he did: acute focus, utter concentration, diligence, obsessive attention; processing data, distilling, making choices step by step to accomplish his goal.

  Perhaps, two goals, in truth. The commands of the Warmaster, waiting high above for the work to be accomplished, of course, that goal first and formost. Take the Palace. But also Perturabo’s own, private, iron hard ambition. To best his estranged brother Dorn, to take the ultimate prize, to finally answer the question that had generated jealousy and rivalry from the very first days: immovable object, unstoppable force… Which ceases to be when they meet?

  From the view at hand, it seemed to Abaddon that the smart wagers were an unstoppable force. He gazed out at what the Lord of Iron was so singularly failing to appreciate. They were on a Landing platform midway up the artificial mountain of the Lion’s Gates space port, an objective hard-won five days earlier. The port, wounded but able to function, rumbled with activity. The mass Freight lifters and elevators assemblies were pouring manpower and machines down to the surface levels. The immense edifice was also presented: Abaddon could hear and feel the cackle and slither of the Neverborn things that were coalescing around the space port’s structure, taking form and flowing like oil, like rancid fat, into the open city below.

  Every few moments there was a vibration, transmitted from kilometres above, as another bulk warship grazed the docking rings and locked into place. Smoke, in thick banks, clambered up from below, gusting from the base structure and skirts where fighting still raged. But Abaddon could see enough: the vast, vast heart of the Anterior Barbican laid out below, the towers and fortresses, the streets, the fires; the distant shape of the cyclopean Lion’s Gate two hundred kilometres south-west, with its implacable rings of concentric walls and sub-gates; the shielded expanse of the Sanctum Imperialis beyond that, vague in the ash haze. A distant mountain range, but closer than it h
ad ever been before.

  Below, many hundreds of metres straight down, the fields of fire, the burning, blackened, mangled zones around the port, thoroughfares that had once been the majestic entrance to the most exalted citadel in the Imperium. A million fires like spilled coals, ropes of smoke, the fire-cracker flash of heavy artillery, the lightning pulse of engine main-weapons, aircraft and strike ships darting past like birds, flocking and mobbing. The last swirls of their long migration home.

  Abaddon looked at the view. It was more than he had ever imagined, and he had imagined it a thousand times. He looked at the view, then at Perturabo in his cell of data, then back again. Theory and practice, side by side.

  Practice. Execution. That was where Abaddon’s heart lay. Naturally, he admired Perturabo’s genius, his virtuoso art that had made this all possible. But he was so detached. When he finally triumphed, and he would, would it be by the touch of another haptic control? Would he make one last command stroke, and know it was done, and only then, at last, look up and see the reality he had wrought?

  That was not Abaddon’s way. A proper ending came with the blow of a sword, not the touch of a button. Blades and mettle had won the crusade, and they should win this. Not theory.

  Not warp magic either. Not the shrieking, filthy warp-things manifesting in the port around him, or inhabiting the flesh of beloved brothers as though they were second-hand garments. This end-war was being too much determined by new methods. Abaddon trusted the old ones far more.

  Freight-lifter doors squealed open behind him, footsteps thumped across the deck.

  ‘Why do you wait?’ Lord Eidolon asked.

  Abaddon glanced at the III Legion champion. Eidolon’s retinue trailed him, wretched and gaudy in their enhanced and augmented battleplate. Their faces, and in some cases their forms, had grown wildly misshapen. Their adopted colour schemes hurt the eyes. They were the cream of the Phoenician’s men, the Emperor’s Children, grotesquely and excessively ornate. Haughty bastards. Why did they preserve the name? Did Fulgrim fear offending his father somehow? Names could be changed. There was honour in that. When the time demanded, wolves became sons. Sons of a better father.

  ‘Respect?’ Abaddon suggested.

  ‘Also, there’s a wonderful view,’ said Horus Aximand.

  ‘Respect of what?’ asked Eidolon. His voice was unnatural, sonically phased. He regarded the four warriors of the Mournival, and the row of black burnished Justaerin Terminators standing honour guard behind them. Abaddon could almost smell his scorn, and the look in Eidolon’s eyes spoke of the very special place he kept in his heart for the XVI Legion. A place swimming with contempt.

  ‘There is work to be done,’ he announced.

  ‘I’m aware,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘My beloved lord,’ said Eidolon, ‘grows-‘

  ‘Many more supple breasts every day?’ asked Aximand. Kibre snorted loudly.

  ‘Don’t goad him, little one,’ said Abaddon, smiling despite himself ‘It really might put our good lord Perturabo off his stroke if we started brawling with our brothers while he worked.’

  He looked at Eidolon.

  ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘it might dent that lovely armour. Which would be a terrible shame.’

  He stroked his fingers down the ludicrously decorated pauldron of Eidolon’s plate. Eidolon caught his hand, stopped it, clenched it very tightly, and smiled back.

  ‘It’s good we can still have fun,’ Eidolon said. ‘A tonic for the toils ahead. I’ve always enjoyed indulging your juvenile horseplay.’

  His smile did not diminish. His teeth were perfect, like fine ivory. His face was not. It was like a painted parody of human features, fixed like a carnival mask. Frilled sacs breathed either side of his throat.

  ‘I was trying to say,’ he continued, his voice oddly modulated, as if an ultrasonic shriek wandered and skirled behind the words, ‘if I’d been allowed to finish, that my beloved lord grows fatigued by the delays. He is impatient. Almost listless. It’s a tragedy to see. He is-‘

  ‘Not the man he was?’ asked Little Horus.

  Eidolon forced out a courtesy laugh.

  ‘Oh, how you play, Little Horus. He is changed. Aren’t we all? All of us, made glorious? Even those in your own clumsy ranks?’

  He looked at Tormageddon. Tormageddon was still gazing blankly al the lifter-throne. Something was purring inside him, and fluid seeped horn his cracked lips. Abaddon eyed him. Tormageddon was not what he had once been. Death and resurrection came at a price. The hulking fourth member of the Mournival wasn’t Tarik Torgaddon, who had once been the best of men, nor was it Grael Noctua, whose flesh had been borrowed. There was, disturbingly, something of both of them in the warrior’s features, but there was something else too, something underneath that stretched and twisted the face into a bloated pastiche. Abaddon disliked Tormageddon’s proximity, disliked the fact he was any part of their quartet. They bore him with them like a scar, the cost of doing business. Whatever lived in Tormageddon’s armour and meat, Abaddon had no desire to know it any beller.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ he said. He pulled his hand from Eidolon’s grip.

  ‘My lord Fulgrim grows impatient. I thought this was to be a planning session? He has sent me to propose an acceleration of attack.

  Now the engines are down, a full and frontal assault of the Lion’s Gate.

  Let’s split the Sanctum open and have done with this delay.’ Abaddon sighed. ‘Eidolon, I am dismayed to find myself agreeing with you, and with desires of your lord and master.’

  ‘Really?’ replied Eidolon.

  ‘You know how very much that must pain me,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘I am gratified that good sense can be spoken between us,’ said Eidolon, ‘that we may put aside our trivial contentions and stand as one mind. The war is, after all, the most important thing.’

  ‘I enjoy teasing the shit out of you,’ said Little Horus, ‘but there is a time and place. The Warmaster wants Terra taken, and we would not disappoint him with delays. We all serve the Warmaster.’

  ‘We do,’ said Eidolon, alter too long a pause.

  ‘All well and good,’ said Falkus Kibre. ‘But your Lord Fulgrim’s suggestion won’t be entertained.’

  ‘How so, Kibre?’ Eidolon asked. A fluting sob of noise echoed each syllable.

  ‘Because there’s a plan,’ said Kibre. ‘The Warmaster has issued his objectives, clearly stated, and the Lord of Iron is executing them. Seise the ports, land the host, raze the city, then take the Palace. A methodical undertaking, old school.’

  Eidolon laughed. ‘This is no undertaking,’ he said.

  ‘It really is,’ said Aximand.

  ‘What? Are we… bringing Terra to compliance?’ Eidolon giggled.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abaddon. ‘It may be the Throneworld, and it may be an uncommon undertaking, but it’s what we have always done. The suppression and conquest of worlds that counter the interests of the Imperium.’

  ‘You’re serious,’ said Eidolon.

  ‘Someone’s got to be,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘Lord Fulgrim’s proposal of a full and focused assault is attractive,’ said Kibre. ‘But it will be dismissed. It is contrary to the Warmaster’s instructions, and to Lord Perturabo’s plans.’

  ‘Besides, the aegis of the Sanctum Imperialis remains intact,’ said Abaddon. ‘The voids and the telaethesic ward. This process is an attrition to wear them down. Until they fall, we can’t mount a full and focused assault because our Neverborn assets cannot be brought to bear.’ I can’t believe I’m defending that aspect, Abaddon thought. We can’t unleash our daemons. When did a war hinge on that?

  Eidolon looked in Perturabo’s direction.

  ‘I say we bring this meeting to order and put it to the mighty Lord of Iron. See what he thinks.’

  ‘After you,’ said Abaddon.

  As Abaddon had anticipated, the Lord of Iron was not receptive to Eidolon’s propo
sal. He did not, however, rage at them, as Abaddon might have expected, no matter how much hatred brewed in him for the Sons of Horus and the Emperor’s Children. Petty feuds no longer had any place in his mind. It seemed Perturabo was in his element, relishing every moment of a game he had played out in his head over and over again for years. He dismounted the lifter-throne to converse with them, looming over them, and addressing Eidolon’s remarks in a blunt but cordial manner. He praised Eidolon, and so by extension Primarch Fulgrim, for his enthusiasm. He was fierce-eyed, vital, eager to show them the complex beauty and ingenuity of his grand stratagem. He tilted some of the throne’s screens so that he could describe certain patterns and tactical nuances.

  ‘I’ve never seen him so… happy,’ whispered Horus Aximand. ‘That is what it is, isn’t it? That’s the Lord of Iron happy?’

  Abaddon nodded. ‘Like a grox in shit. This is what he was born for.’ And it was beautiful. The summary Perturabo gave, the casual yet absolute knowledge of the data, the subtle expression of field strategy – adjusting for this, predicting for that, reading the battle sphere fifty moves ahead, like a regicide grand master. Abaddon’s regard for Lord Perturabo’s gifts reached new levels of awed respect. He was the right man for this greatest of undertakings. No one could come close to doing it better. Abaddon found himself taking careful mental notes, fascinated by the game plan that Perturabo laid out.

  ‘Great lord,’ he said, pointing. ‘There, to the south. You just mentioned it in passing. It seems a valuable opportunity. Will you not implement it?’

  The Lord of Iron looked at him, and almost smiled. His eyes were black pits, but points of light blazed in them like distant suns.

  ‘You have a sharp mind, Son of Horus. Few have the acuity to notice the elegance of that. Sadly, it does not comply with the approach your genefather has ordained. I am obliged to hold it in reserve, for now. I would not risk the Warmaster’s ill will by deviating from his wishes. But in the unlikely event that Dorn shows some final spark of wit, and manages some last rally, then it’s a gambit I can employ.’