Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  ‘My Khagan wishes that the chain of command be respected,’ said the seer. ‘Your authority, commander. My Khagan would appreciate your consent. We must work together, not at odds.’

  ‘I’m grateful for that,’ said Agathe. ‘Can we look first, make an assessment?’

  The seer nodded.

  ‘Your name is Naranbaatar?’ Agathe asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do I address you?’

  ‘As Naranbaatar.’

  Agathe bid them follow her with a gesture. They walked down the armoured hall, and crossed the retractable walkbridge that spanned one of the massive munition shafts that spined the wall’s midsection. She could hear the dull thump of the transhuman footsteps behind her, ringing on the metal, the firm clip of Naranbaatar’s totem staff as it struck the deck, in pace with his stride.

  ‘Rest assured, we will not engage,’ Raldoron said to her as they walked.

  ‘Rest assured, lord, I don’t think we could engage,’ she replied.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘But the Khan has ruled that only the Custodians seem lit to wage battle, in any hand-to-hand fashion, against the Neverborn. They seemed sanctified in a way the rest of us are not.’

  ‘The flies die when they land on them,’ she said.

  ‘Quite so. The spirit of our master flows most purely in them, a light against the darkness. Perhaps our best weapon.’

  ‘I’ll tell my soldiers, if the walls are breached, to hold fire until a Custodian comes.’

  Raldoron made some small sound behind his visor. A grunt perhaps, or a chuckle.

  ‘He had a dry wit too,’ the First Captain remarked. They had entered a garrison well beyond the bridge, past rows of blast-boxes that were filled with edgy, waiting men. The overheads, glowing dull amber, were laced with flies.

  ‘Who?’ Agathe asked.

  ‘Burr,’ he remarked. ‘Your predecessor.’

  ‘My friend,’ she said.

  ‘Mine too, marshal. I liked him very much.’

  For a human?’

  ‘I do not make such distinctions, Marshal Agathe. A good soul is a good soul.’

  She stopped abruptly, and turned to look at him, square-on, so she could line up the blinkered gas hood and see him clearly.

  ‘I think that’s a luxury only the Legiones Astartes enjoy, lord,’ she said. ‘We see the distinction very clearly, every time one of you walks into the room. You remind us we are small. You remind us we are lesser things. And very mortal.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I am… sorry to have said it,’ she returned, and continued on.

  ‘My presence here, and the presence of legionaries like me, was intended to rally and uplift, not diminish morale,’ he called after her.

  ‘I said I was sorry,’ she replied.

  ‘You understand, marshal, that we fight for you,’ Raldoron said, resuming step to easily catch up with her. ‘We were born to fight for you.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘The soul of mankind-‘

  ‘Captain, my lord… it is very clear to me that you were born to fight for something. I hope it’s us. I hope the life of mankind is the precious gift that gives purpose to your warring. But I am tired, and I am scared, and I am confused. I cannot see in this hood, I can barely breathe. I think of my family, far away, to give me hope and strength, and the thought of them destroys that hope, because I am afraid that they are already dead. I do not know what to think any more, or what to understand. I know you were born to fight for something. Right now, that’s all.’

  He caught her arm with one of his immense, plated hands, and stopped her.

  ‘We fight for you,’ he insisted.

  Agathe stared at him. His warhelm, as always, conveyed no expression. He removed his hand.

  ‘Through here,’ she said.

  She took them up a cargo ramp, past the oiled mechanisms of bulk autoloader systems that had become furry with adhered flies, and into one of the gun silos. The chamber was large, reinforced, and baffled with damping blocks. Six macro-guns, locked back in recoil position on their platforms, faced the gun slot. The blast shutters were down, as per her orders.

  Gun crews and Kimmerine troops got up quickly as she entered with her Astartes escort. An officer approached her, and saluted.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked. Nearby, a Kimmerine subaltern was hunched by the foot of the guns, his hood off. He was shivering and weeping, oblivious to the flies crawling on his face.

  ‘His brother keeps calling to him,’ the officer said.

  ‘Where is his brother?’

  ‘Dead four weeks ago, mam.’

  ‘I have him removed at once, please. Get him to the medicae. I want the obs shutter opened.’

  Two troopers hauled the weeping man away. The officer stepped onto the observation platform, produced his chain of keys and unlocked the shutter bolts. He started to crank the handle to lift the blast cover that blocked the glass of the obs slit. Agathe swung down a heavy field scope on its brass armature.

  The slit’s glass was thick. Nothing but an orange glow showed beyond. She adjusted the field scope to look. Raldoron pulled down a second scope, and paired it with his visor systems.

  Outside, a bleakness. A waste, shimmered by thermal radiation and the distorted signal-feed of the scope. They were a long way up. The Seventeenth Platform gun-boxes were over three hundred metres above talus, at the foot of the curtain wall.

  The field outside Colossi was a mangled darkness. The outer lines, trench system and earthworks laid before the bastion had been ploughed up into a torn and tortured mire, where no trace of the original defensive structures or formations could be detected. A heavy smog lay across the view, slowly drifting banks of smoke and vaporised ejecta. Fires dotted the waste-ground, patches of flickering orange that danced between the few, scattered ruins of trees. Beside the leaping flames and the crackling distortion of the wall’s void shields, there was no movement. No nothing.

  Agathe was about to push the scope away. She froze. Trees. There were no trees on the approach to Colossi Gate. The things she had seen weren’t trees.

  They were the Neverborn beasts. She counted eleven of them. The huge, dark monsters had ceased their assault, and lowered their therianthropic forms to the ground. They were kneeling in the mud, some close, others further away, corded arms slack at their sides, heads bowed, anders and homed crowns raised like the stark branches of winter trees. They were facing the fortress. It felt as if they were waiting.

  Or praying.

  Some simmering brimstone heat, a coal-red glow, pulsed slowly and softly in their shadowed faces.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she asked in a whisper.

  Raldoron didn’t reply. Agathe swallowed hard, and closed her eyes, trying to clear her head and block the ominous image. She heard a voice.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked, glancing at Raldoron. But he hadn’t spoken. And it couldn’t have been him. It was a human voice, light and far away.

  ‘May I?’ Naranbaatar asked her, gesturing to the scope. Agathe stepped aside, and let him look.

  ‘Gathering power,’ the Stormseer said. ‘Perhaps they have expended their wrath for now, and are recharging their anima, or-‘

  ‘Or?’ asked Agathe.

  ‘Or they are performing some ritual,’ he said. ‘Focusing their spirits to reach out into the Neversea of the Immateria, to gain insight or strength.’

  ‘Do you… do you know that?’ Agathe asked him.

  ‘I feel it. Sense it. Like a charge in the wind, a brewing thunderhead. An echo of their shadow-selves, calling to the darkness that spawned them.’

  Let me back in.

  ‘What?’ Agathe asked sharply.

  The White Scar turned from the scope.

  ‘What do you ask me, marshal?’

  ‘You said… Let me back in.’

  ‘I did not.’
>
  ‘I heard the words.’ Agathe moved to the scope again. Naranbaatar stopped her.

  ‘Do not look again,’ he said. ‘If you have heard the whisper, they are playing with you.’

  ‘I will look,’ she insisted.

  ‘Please do not.’

  Let me back in.

  Agathe stared at him. ‘I just heard it again,’ she said.

  ‘A trick.’

  ‘I know the voice,’ she said.

  ‘Burr,’ said Raldoron. He stepped back from the scope. ‘I heard it too.’

  ‘He’s out there?’ Agathe asked.

  ‘No, marshal. Naranbaatar is right. They are trying to wear down our sanity. Konas is dead.’

  Raldoron pushed both sets of scopes up into their cradles.

  ‘Close the shutter,’ he told the officer. ‘Lock it. Marshal, if the Never-born are quiet, we can venture up to the wall top. Take advantage of this lull, and let the seers make their preparations.’

  Agathe nodded. ‘You heard him too?’ she asked. ‘If there’s a chance he’s alive…’

  ‘I saw Burr looking back at me through the scope,’ he said without emotion. ‘Staring, pleading. We are three hundred metres up, marshal. That’s how I was sure he is dead.’

  * * *

  Amon Tauromachian checked the locks of Fo’s cell door. The boom of its closing still echoed through the cold and draughty darkness of the prison around them. Amon picked up his lamp to lead them away.

  ‘We should-‘ Keeler began.

  ‘We should forget what we just heard,’ said the Custodian.

  ‘We can’t!’ she exclaimed. ‘Custodian, we must take this to the Praetorian. To your master at least-‘

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘Fo is loathsome,’ she said. ‘Beyond redemption, but his abilities as a biomechanic are in no doubt. His skills are listed in detail on his file.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Amon, if he says he can make a weapon, we must take him seriously. It doesn’t matter who he is or what he’s done, if he can provide a means of ending this, then we must-‘

  ‘That’s not what he described,’ said the Custodian.

  ‘He can make a weapon to destroy the Lupercal,’ said Keeler.

  ‘That’s not what he described,’ Amon repeated slowly. ‘He proposed the manufacture of a biomechanical phage. Tailored and specific. I have no question that he is capable of it. The phage would kill Horus Lupercal, yes, because it would be coded to wipe out everything of that gene-altered pattern in the Imperium. Horus, yes. And every primarch. And every legionary. On both sides. It would exterminate the transhuman genetic lineage of mankind.’

  She paused, then nodded.

  ‘Yes, it would,’ she said. ‘And that’s unthinkable. But we’re standing at the edge of total extinction, and the triumph of the warp. This moment is the unthinkable. What price is too great to win that, and shut down the Primordial Annihilator, and let mankind live?’

  ‘Not that,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I agree. Nevertheless, Amon Tauromachian, The Praetorian must know about it. He is running this war, and every second takes us closer to doom. He must be aware of all his options.’

  It took a long while for Amon to respond.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he must.’

  * * *

  They rose into the gloomy air above the wall top, passing through gas shutters and blast shields, to exit onto the fighting platform of Artemis lower, the central ravelin of Colossi. It was nocturnal. A warm, foetid wind blew in from the burning wastes. The air was drawn with smoke, and low with swollen brown clouds. Agathe kept her hazard gear on.

  ‘Five minutes,’ she said.

  The Stormseers nodded. They wandered out into the open part of the wide platform, talking softly to each other. They were looking up at the curved edge of the void shields that shimmered overhead, like the ghost of a gigantic wave breaking across the wall. The void sections were secured vertically, and extended out across the fighting platform, and beyond, for sixty metres. Beyond that, they decayed to nothing. Colossi’s energy shields covered the fortress like a shelf, a miserable relic of the mighty void system that had once screened the entire gate and outworks beyond, projecting for five kilometres.

  ‘Go back below, marshal,’ Raldoron told her. ‘I will watch them until they are done. No need for you to be here too.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ she said, shifting uncomfortably in the hot, toxic wind.

  ‘Please, Agathe, just go below,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I am concerned for your wellbeing. You are not as robust as us legionaries.’

  ‘Captain, that’s not it at all. You’re being disingenuous.’ She tried to step past him. ‘What are you hiding? You’re trying to block something from me.’

  ‘Please, Agathe.’

  ‘I want to see, First Captain. I need to-‘

  She stopped in her tracks. She could see what Raldoron had been trying to mask from her with his bulk. An object placed on the crenellations at the edge of the fighting platform, twenty metres away.

  It was small and pale.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Raldoron. ‘You didn’t need to see that. The Neverborn filth knew we were coming. They left us a gift.’

  Agathe stared for a long time, and turned her back when she could no longer bear to look into the sightless eyes of Konas Burr’s grey, severed head.

  FIVE

  * * *

  Another angel

  Hope is not an error

  Olympos

  As Sanguinius, the Lord of Baal, climbed the inner staircase to the fighting platform of the fourth circuit wall, he felt the pounding in his head resume.

  The pulse came in time with the thump of the kettle drums the massing traitor hosts were beating, and skipped arrhythmically at every crump and pop of nearby combats. But neither the drumming nor the blast of munitions was causing it. Other minds were grazing against his again, other minds, brother minds.

  One especially.

  He walked, because his great wings ached, and his spirits were low, but he kept his face set with a stern yet kind aspect. He would not show weakness to his sons, or Rann’s stalwart Imperial Fists, nor to any warrior of Terra or Mars who stood this line with him. He understood his chief purpose and role. Few beings in creation could match him in war, but in war of this scale he was but one small element. No matter his prowess, no matter his deeds, he would not turn the

  fight for Gorgon Bar alone. His role was as a figurehead, a living standard, to bind the defence, and nurse its strength.

  And he knew his repeated absence from the line had already been noticed. Rumours were spreading that he was sick, or wounded. Sanguinius had tried to confine himself alone, in his chambers, while he staved off the plague of visions. He didn’t want people to see him struggling, too many soldiers had seen him fall to his knees on the walkway and cry out in agony. Word had got around. He could not let that happen again. When the visions came, and the fits took him, he stole away and endured them in private.

  But he had been missed. His absence marked. Unease was brewing. The sight of him unmanned, in pain and distress, would break morale, but so too could the gap he left by not being visible. A figurehead only worked if it could be seen. Undone by the visions, he was tailing as a warrior and as an inspiration.

  It was a burden like no other, far worse than the uncalled-for responsibility of Imperium Secundus that Roboute had placed on him. The Great Angel was the protector. If he failed, then Terra would fail. Perhaps the visions afflicting his mind were the very weapons Horus would use to destroy him. It wasn’t his literal death he had seen during the Ruinstorm: it was his symbolic failure, his disintegration as a viable force of good.

  Soldiers on the steps saluted and bowed as Sanguinius passed. He paused to talk to some,
to clasp hands and lift hearts. That was how it worked. A few words from the Great Angel reforged mettle.

  Bel Sepatus and Halen awaited him on the landing stage below the parapet. The shiver of nearby fighting was louder. He could smell the smoke lapping across the wall.

  ‘They mass?’ he asked.

  ‘To your schedule, so it seems,’ replied Sepatus sardonically.

  ‘Just sorties so far, lord,’ said Halen, passing him a hardened dataslate. ‘A dozen since dawn. Probing for weaknesses in our line.’

  ‘Structural?’ asked Sanguinius.

  ‘And spiritual,’ Halen replied. ‘They aim to break us this morning.

  They are testing to see what sections are weak.’

  ‘None are weak,’ said Sepatus quickly.

  ‘Indeed, captain,’ replied Fisk Halen. ‘I mean only that some are stronger than others.’

  ‘Bel knew what you meant, my friend,’ said Sanguinius. ‘There’s no shame in weakness.’ He reviewed the data carefully.

  ‘The Berengerian Fusiliers-‘ Halen said.

  ‘Should be rotated out,’ said Sanguinius, nodding as he read. ‘They took the brunt on second circuit. They haven’t been allowed a chance to stand down for nine days.’

  ‘The company commander refuses to leave your side,’ said Halen.

  ‘And I embrace his courage,’ said Sanguinius. ‘But they are weak as they stand, dead on their feet. Pull them, Fisk, and give them six hours on the reserve line to rest and resupply.’

  ‘I have two battalions of Prushik Kurassiers waiting in the yards for a place on the fighting step,’ said Halen. ‘Fresh from the Sanctum last night.’

  ‘Make that change, captain,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Tell the Berengerian chief I have personally requested his brave men rest, for I have them in mind for a special action later. Use the word brave.’

  ‘Special action, lord?’ asked Sepatus.

  ‘Holding Gorgon Bar,’ said Sanguinius. ‘He doesn’t need to know specifics. He just needs a reason to stand down that will not bruise his pride.’

  Halen nodded, and took back the slate.

  The pounding in Sanguinius’ temples had grown worse.

  ‘Let’s see the day,’ he told them. He made himself smile.