Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  Bone-white armour badged in terrible signs, human pelts tied around it, a ragged cloak of scorched chainmail. A chainaxe, screaming.

  World later.

  Their firing line, ragged to begin with, broke, and began to scatter, despite Camba Diaz’s previous instructions. Just the sight of the thing had unmanned them, that and the hideous, wordless howls it was shrieking. It rushed them like a charging simian, faster than anything had any right to be in the world.

  But Diaz was fast too. He stopped being the grim, taciturn sculpture that had been gliding along with them, measured and ponderous.

  He moved like a blur.

  He got between them and the charging World Eater. He met it with shield raised, and longsword swinging from its scabbard. The impact was like runaway trains hitting head-on. Water sprayed. Waves crashed far in all directions. Sparks fizzled blue and electric as the chainaxe’s teeth hit the rising shield. The collision knocked Diaz backwards. Joseph thought, surely they should be evenly matched? Legionary against legionary. Transhuman strength against transhuman strength.

  But the beast in white seemed far stronger. Bigger, too. Its scything axe caught Diaz’s shield, and spun him off his feet. The beast bellowed, and chopped down at the floundering Imperial Fist. That impact made a ghastly, snapping sound. Sparks and chips of yellow ceramite flew up.

  The side of the monster’s head blew out. One of the other Imperial lists had closed in, and brought his bolter to bear. The World Eater swayed, its head partly removed, blood and bone and teeth visible through the cracked ceramite. It reeled, and lashed out. The back-spike of its axe caught the Imperial Fist who had shot it across the faceplate, and wrenched him sideways into the water. The third Imperial Fist was aiming his boltgun, but the axe smashed it out of his hands. The third Imperial Fist tried to stagger back out of strike radius. The World Eater roared, blood squirting and drooling from its ravaged head, and swung hard.

  Camba Diaz came up out of the water in a wave of spray, and ran his power sword through it from behind. The searing longsword blade impaled it through the torso. Still, it refused to die. Diaz kept the blade in place, and held the beast fast, preventing it moving closer to the third Imperial Fist.

  The third Imperial Fist wrenched out a compact-pattern bolt pistol mag-locked to the back of his waistplate. A hold-out piece. He emptied the sidearm point-blank into the chest and face of the monster Diaz had pinned in front of him.

  The rapid shots made a huge, echoing report. The impaled World Eater bucked and shook as the explosive rounds shredded its chest, shoulders and sternum, shattering plate armour and chewing it apart Flecks of blood flew six or seven metres.

  It went limp, cored out and mangled from the belly up. Diaz eased his grip, and let the hulking ruin slide down into the bubbling water. He pulled his blade out.

  The third Imperial Fist reloaded his pistol, clamped it back on his plate, and recovered his primary weapon. The second Imperial Fist regained his feet, a huge, bare-metal gouge across the cheek and bridge of his visor.

  Diaz turned to the Army stragglers.

  ‘Stay in formation when I tell you to,’ he said.

  * * *

  Crossing wide, open yards that were flecked with rubble, they got a proper view of the firestorms to the north-east. None of them had ever seen so much fire before, a wall of it thirty kilometres long and higher than a rampart. The heat, even at that distance, felt unbearable. Boenition District was gone. Through their scopes, they saw survivors fleeing the edge of the inferno into the cratered wasteland of Damascus Park. ‘Survivors’ was the wrong word. They were limping, blackened figures, trailing smoke, some still on fire, unable to

  claw the burning napthek from their flesh and clothing. They walked out of the torrent of flames as if to escape, and then fell. The edge of the park was littered with smouldering bodies.

  White ash and oily rain fell, like a blizzard and a tropical storm at once. Ahead, through the miasmal drifts of brown and yellow smoke, they saw a huge structure with outer barbicans and defensive lines. Willem wondered if it was Angevin Bastion, though he had presumed that the constant roar of casemate weapons coming from the west was Angevin.

  They couldn’t see the true size or shape of the structure they were approaching. Smoke filled the air, the whole sky, and obscured everything except the lower ground works and fore-batteries of the enceinte. Whatever the place was, it was of stupendous size. It promised safety and cover at last.

  They approached the outworks along a trackway, an old transit route, passing scarred or abandoned habitations. Missiles began to fall behind them, two or three kilometres east, huge lumps of stone hurled by petrary engines that fell soundlessly, and struck with shivering force, each impact a numbing boom of incredible volume, a fireless explosion, a column of dirt and debris. At Diaz’s order, they began to double time.

  The outer defenders were waiting for them: ragged loyalist Army, Solar Auxilia, citizen militia. Their emplacements looked sound, some well-made, some makeshift. Support weapons in dug-out firing pits, ditches, ceramite revetments; bundled loops of stake-pinned razor wire and scattered spike-blocks to maim approaching armour.

  They crossed the iron boards of a temporary bridge thrown out across a deep heat-sink channel that had been fortified into a defence ditch. Armed troops came out to meet them. A few of the soldiers in the straggler group began to weep in relief.

  Willem saw a Space Marine emerge from the paling line. His armour was white, but it glowed like pearl. His markings were red. His head was bare, scalp shaved, bearded. The White Scar came up to Diaz, saluted, and then embraced his brother. They spoke, but they were too far ahead for Willem to hear what they were saying.

  ‘From here, we can fight,’ Joseph said to Willem. Willem nodded.

  ‘A stronghold,’ said Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar). He wiped tears from his cheeks, embarrassed. ‘Safety, thank the Throne.’

  Joseph smiled at one of the Solar Auxilia troopers escorting them in.

  ‘Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army),’ he said.

  The man eyed him, and shrugged.

  ‘Al-Nid Nazira, Auxilia,’ he replied.

  ‘What is this place, my friend?’ asked Joseph.

  ‘Eternity Wall Port,’ the man replied.

  FOUR

  * * *

  Conviction

  The thunder of hooves

  Hate everything, win anyway (objective tactical clarity)

  The warden of the watch, a Solar Auxilia veteran called Vaskale, checked their warrants carefully. He ran them through the optical reader twice, frowning. He hadn’t seen documents like them before, but the seal of the Praetorian was authentic.

  ‘Kyril Sindermann, Hari Harr,’ he muttered, handing them back. ‘What’s this concerning?’

  ‘We are commissioned to gather reports,’ Hari replied. ‘To document in the fashion of-‘

  Sindermann stopped him, a hand on the boy’s sleeve, a cautioning smile.

  ‘Warden,’ he said to Vaskale, ‘our warrants are intended to remove the necessity of repeated explanation. Our work is urgent, and time is finite.’ The air shivered. Distant thunder rolled. A bombardment of macro cannon shells was falling like sleet across the aegis twenty kilometres away. Sindermann tilted his head at the sound. ‘Finite,’ he repeated.

  Vaskale nodded, huffed. He took up his crutches, and led them through the inner hatch, each step a twin thump of the sticks planting together and a sliding slap of one boot. The effort made him grunt and wince.

  The Blackstone was a large and hulking annex in the skirts of the Hegemon complex, built as robustly as any of Dorn’s fortifications, but inside out. It was designed to keep things in. Its sulking travertine walls, thirty metres thick, were laced with buttresses of Cadian-mined noctilith, and every portal was a series of blast hatches and portcullis grates. It served the Imperial Palace as its primary penitentiary. Other pr
isons existed, for civil crimes, out in Magnifican, though fate alone knew what had become of them and their inmates. Only the sub-level known as the Dungeon, beneath the Palatine Central, was a more secure place of imprisonment. According to Vaskale, much of that had been cleared. He didn’t know why. Traitors, political subversives and other recidivists had been transported to the Blackstone for incarceration.

  ‘Throne knows what that’s about,’ Vaskale mumbled as he limped along. He was short of breath from the effort. ‘We should shoot them all. Have done.’

  ‘Shoot them?’ Hari asked.

  Vaskale shrugged, turning to them as he waited for one of his men to unlock the next series of hatches. ‘Liquidate them. What? Time’s not the only finite quantity, gentlemen. Space is, too. Resources. We’re keeping these devils warm and fed, safe from harm. You’ve seen what it’s like outside. Good people starving, begging for shelter.’

  Sindermann nodded. They had. As they’d hurried through the streets around the Hegemon, they’d passed through throngs of the displaced and injured, past petitioners, past soup kitchens and welfare centres I he Sanctum Imperials was flooded with refugees seeking safety, and Sindermann knew it was but a fraction of the pitiful host trying to gain access from the Palace zones outside.

  ‘So you’d see these prisoners executed?’ Sindermann asked.

  ‘They have more space and better provision than any bastard out there,’ Vaskale replied. He glanced at the guard. ‘Hurry up, Gelling! You know the codes!’

  Vaskale looked back at Sindermann and his young companion, searching their faces for some sign of understanding.

  ‘The Blackstone’s a big place,’ he said. ‘We could take overspill.

  Accommodate thousands. Temporary of course, but better than-‘

  ‘Out there?’ asked Sindermann.

  Vaskale nodded. ‘We have set food and water rations every day for the inmates. That’s a waste, isn’t it? They’re not on our side, or they wouldn’t be in here. Why feed and house them, when we can’t feed and house our own?’

  ‘I think the answer to that lies somewhere in the field of ethics,’ ventured Sindermann. ‘In trying to maintain some kind of decent, human society.’

  ‘Really? Does it?’ Vaskale replied. He chewed that over. ‘You, you’re making reports, are you? Enquiring? My name going to be mentioned?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Sindermann.

  ‘I’m nut ashamed of my opinion,’ said Vaskale.

  ‘And you’re entitled to it.’

  ‘No. I see that look. Snooty, superior, liberal-intellectual… I’m not suggesting some…… eugenic cull, I’m-‘

  ‘I never said you were,’ said Sindermann. ‘You’re desperate. We all are.

  We’re caught in the greatest siege history has ever known, and everything we have is dwindling and running out. You are obligated to keep and feed criminals and threats to our sovereignty, while good people go without. So you voice a pragmatic idea.’

  ‘Pragmatic,’ Vaskale nodded.

  ‘Brutal, but pragmatic,’ said Sindermann. ‘I fear you’re right. It may come to that. I also fear that, if it does, then we cross a line and become no better than the things trying to break these walls in.’

  Vaskale scowled. The guard had opened the hatches. He waved them on, down a long, dank hallway that was utterly without decoration or hope.

  ‘Where were you injured?’ asked Hari as they walked.

  ‘Me?’ asked Vaskale, glancing back. ‘Dawn Gate, about three weeks past. Got unlucky. Lost my leg, mashed my hip. Can’t fight on the line, but I’m sound enough to be turnkey here.’

  ‘Where’s the previous warden?’ asked Hari.

  ‘On the line with a gun in his hand,’ Vaskale answered, chuckling darkly. ‘We all of us do what we can, don’t we?’

  ‘We do,’ said Sindermann.

  Another guard opened another hatch, and the warden brought them into a broad stone chamber, a congressional for communal dining. Guard posts overlooked the bench tables.

  Vaskale had voxed ahead to have the prisoner brought up from the cells.

  The warden looked at them.

  ‘I apologise if my comment offended you,’ he said.

  Sindermann shook his head. This is what we are now, sir,’ he replied. ‘We serve the Emperor the best we can. Fight, if that’s what we can do. If we can’t fight, or if we’re wounded, we serve however else we can, but still the best we can. Each wound is pain. Each wound shrinks the Palace a little more. But we serve. What you suggested… Sir, I hope it doesn’t become a necessity. You’re not the only one seeing the worst, and understanding what that may force us to do.’

  Vaskale half-nodded. ‘Inform the guards when you’re ready to leave,’ he said, and limped away, his metal crutches clacking.

  ‘You’ve met the warden, I see,’ said Euphrati Keeler. They sat down facing her across one of the scabby old dining trestles. Hari took out his scuffed dataslate and set it down in front of him.

  ‘The warden’s just a little closer to despair than we are,’ said Sindermann.

  Keeler shrugged. ‘Speak for yourself.’

  Her hair was loose, unwashed and lank. Her skin was unhealthily pale. She’d been given army surplus breeches, a baggy linen smock and woollen mittens.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Euphrati,’ said Sindermann.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘This is Hari,’ said Sindermann. ‘He’s with me.’

  Keeler looked at the young man. ‘Run, Hari,’ she said. ‘Being with Kyril never ends well. Not his fault, but true.’

  ‘I’m fine, mam,’ said Hari.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Keeler asked Sindermann. ‘Do you bear a pardon with my name on it? No, I doubt that. I hold views that are considered dangerous. They’re beliefs I won’t renounce. But you, you walk free. Did you renounce yours?’

  ‘No,’ said Sindermann. ‘However, the Sigillite’s terms were clear. Freedom of movement and no prosecution for any theist, provided they do not practise or promulgate the cult.’

  ‘Cult?’ she echoed sadly.

  ‘His term,’ said Sindermann. ‘In truth, I’ve set aside my faith for now. It was growing shaky, anyway. You were always more of a figure-head than me.’

  ‘Kyril, you were the voice of-‘

  ‘I have set aside one truth for another. The original Truth. The Imperial Truth. The light is growing dim, Euphrati. Even in the short time since we last met. Hell rises up around us-‘

  ‘And the Emperor protects,’ she said.

  ‘He does,’ said Sindermann. ‘And He may purge the theist movement at any time. I value my freedom… Which is ironic, given we are all trapped here. But I’ve set aside sacred ministry for now, in pursuit of secular work.’

  Sindermann showed her his warrant. She studied it carefully.

  ‘I have another for you,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Kyril? Really? This? Remembrance?’

  ‘I was close to giving up,’ said Sindermann calmly. ‘Giving up everything. My faith gone. My faith in everything, including the rationale of our Imperium. Someone reminded me that we’re not just battling for our lives. We’re battling for our way of living.’

  ‘I don’t want a bloody iteration, Sindermann-‘

  Sindermann held up his hand gently.

  ‘I know, Euphrati. What we were building together, whether we believe it to be sacred or secular, has begun to fall. It’s our duty to fight for it. Every part of it. We’re not legionaries, we’re not even soldiers. There are other things to fight for, and other ways of fighting.’

  There’s only one thing to fight for,’ she said.

  ‘And that is?’

  The Emperor, Kyril.’

  ‘And what is the Emperor?’

  She smiled. ‘People get uncomfortable when I answer that question, Kyril.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Hari. ‘What do you tell them?’
/>   Keeler beamed at the young man. Throne, Kyril! Did you not brief this poor child? Doesn’t he know what kind of poison I spread?’

  ‘I think he’s teasing you,’ said Sindermann. He glanced at Hari.

  ‘Are you teasing?’

  ‘Little bit, sir,’ said Hari.

  Keeler laughed. ‘Oh, I like you! My apologies, Kyril. I should have known you’d choose bright, clever people. He looks so innocent. How old is he?’

  ‘Old enough,’ said Hari.

  ‘Oh, now you’ve spoiled it, Hari,’ Keeler said, tutting. Trying

  to sound like a big, tough man.’ Sindermann’s companion didn’t respond. Keeler stared at him, and frowned. ‘What are you writing?

  What is he writing, Kyril?’

  ‘I suggested to Hari he could make notes…’ Sindermann began.

  Keeler snatched the dataslate from the young man. Hari glanced at Sindermann, stylus in hand.

  ‘Notes,’ said Keeler. She sat back, scrolling, reading. ‘I’m surprised they let you bring this inside.’

  ‘The warden vetted our possessions,’ said Sindermann.

  ‘Yes, Kyril,’ she replied, still reading, flicking through panes with her index finger. ‘But a writing instrument? When I am so full of words? Isn’t a slate considered a weapon these days?’

  She paused, studying the text.

  ‘Euprati Keeler. Imagist. Ex-remembrancer,’ she read aloud. ‘Promulgator of the so-called Lectitio Divinitatus bracket theist bracket.

  Removed to Blackstone facility, Thirteenth Quintus. Pale. Hair untied, appears unwashed…’

  She looked at Hari.

  ‘They won’t give me a tie, Hari. Or much water.’ She looked at the slate, reading again. ‘Appears healthy. U/R.’ She looked back at the young man, quizzical.

  ‘Uh. abbreviation, mam. Unremarkable.’

  She sniffed, considering this. ‘Unremarkable. Why, what did you expect?’

  ‘It’s just an abbreviation,’ Hari replied. ‘I make a lot of notes. report any distinctive features-‘