Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  ‘It can do that?’

  ‘It has done and will do a great many things,’ said Eldrad. ‘It has been seen.’

  Grammaticus tried to hide his shock.

  Eldrad felt a sliver of grief in Grammaticus at the death of Prytanis. To see what he thought was inviolable undone must have shaken his belief, and they were old comrades too, Eldrad supposed.

  ‘And the mission on Macragge, the one you gave me,’ said Grammaticus. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Vulkan lives, I believe is the phrase.’

  Grammaticus said nothing for a few seconds, and Eldrad felt a measure of peace in him, but with that came the memory of Macragge and of what he and Prytanis had shared there, fighting side by side.

  ‘Did you really have to kill him?’

  ‘Damon Prytanis was a wretch, even when considered amongst your wretched species.’

  ‘Yeah, but did you have to kill him?’

  ‘His death no longer occludes the skein.’

  ‘And mine?’ asked Grammaticus. He leaned in and spoke behind his hand, mockingly conspiratorial. ‘And I’m not even going to pretend I understand what the hell you just said to me.’

  Eldrad smiled, though he found humans perturbing.

  ‘Your death will be your last, John.’

  ‘And what’s to stop me taking it now and not doing whatever it is you need me to do?’

  ‘Your inherent morality, of course. That and a lingering sense of a task unfinished.’

  ‘You are placing a lot of faith in my morality.’

  ‘It would not be the first time.’

  ‘True,’ Grammaticus conceded, and looked askance at Narek striding across the field towards them. A visible shiver passed through him.

  ‘I won’t lie to you, your fiend over there just killed a man I thought was unkillable, protected by an ancient cabal that you have apparently been executing for some reason. I am just about cogent enough to have this conversation, but apart from that I am increasingly losing my grasp on rational thought.’

  ‘Can you find him, John?’

  Despite his protestations, Grammaticus knew to whom the seer referred.

  ‘Are you going to kill him too?’

  ‘No. Damon was the last.’

  ‘Then perhaps. Maybe.’

  ‘You must, John. Or he you. That part is still… vague. He will only trust you.’

  ‘And you’re surprised by this? Why have you done this? Why did you need me to bring that primarch back from the dead?’

  Eldrad laughed.

  ‘Is that funny? I don’t understand eldar humour.’

  ‘Only here at the end, do you have questions.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had them throughout. I was just too damn scared to ask them.’

  Eldrad nodded. ‘Very well, though there is little time.’ He glanced to Narek, who shook his head, standing sentry in the wheat stalks slowly bending in the breeze. ‘The Gorgon fell. His death sent a ­ripple across the skein. Fate had been altered, his destiny unwritten. I erred and placed my faith in the wrong son. I looked to fate again, and found another. One who had first to die. And then be reborn.’

  ‘Vulkan.’

  Eldrad raised an eyebrow in curious amusement.

  ‘The capacity remains for rational thought, after all.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘An observation. Vulkan must prevail, and take his place by his father’s side. Horus must be defeated.’

  ‘Those are both, pretty much, gods, regardless of what your theistic position might be on such things. Not sure how I can help with any of that.’

  ‘Your role is crucial. I have seen it.’

  ‘That skein of fate again?’

  Eldrad nodded once more.

  ‘You and Ollanius Persson have a role to play. An important one.’

  ‘For the record, I don’t like this,’ said Grammaticus. ‘Any of it. In fact, I actively bloody hate it.’

  ‘It is Chaos. The will and whims of old gods. I have seen it, I beheld the Fall of my race. We were hubristic. Blind. Mankind is at once the greatest boon and the greatest threat to the Primordial Annihilator. Your souls. Ours. It hungers for them.’

  ‘This is madness. This is straight-up insanity.’

  ‘Have you ever seen what lurks beyond the veil?’ asked Eldrad.

  ‘I have seen it,’ Grammaticus said with a scowl, using anger to chase away his fear.

  ‘That is what awaits mankind if Horus succeeds. Daemons are real. Gods and magic are real. The old ways have returned and the flame of enlightenment dwindles.’

  Grammaticus shook his head, still reeling. ‘And I can turn the tide? We can, Oll and I? What can we do? What use are men against gods?’

  ‘Your Emperor was once a man. Of a kind, at least. He had always placed great faith in men. It is fitting then that men should save Him.’

  ‘I think your race are over fond of poetry.’

  Eldrad frowned.

  Grammaticus shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  He stopped talking as soon as the hulking presence of Narek drew near, stinking of oil and blood and heat.

  ‘More coming,’ he snarled, glancing down at the mortal as if remembering an insect that had dared to sting him.

  Eldrad looked up. He felt them.

  ‘Your prison was isolated, John, but your gaolers are coming now. And in force. You can either remain,’ he said, looking back down at Grammaticus, ‘or you can prove you are the moral man I believe you to be.’

  Eyes returning to the hazy distance, imagining the warriors soon to amass there, Eldrad delved within his robes and brought forth a rib of wraithbone studded with gems and inlaid with runic inscription, conjoined like circuitry.

  He noticed Grammaticus looking at it.

  ‘It will open a path.’

  Light flared, a maelstrom born from the very air, as the ritual was done. Eldrad rose from where he had driven the sharp tooth of the bone deep into the ground, his robes stirred by an eldritch wind.

  ‘What path?’ asked Grammaticus, standing in the light, shouting against the storm. Tears were streaming from his eyes as the wind lashed his face. His hair tossed madly.

  ‘A fork in the road, John. Here our fates diverge again,’ said Eldrad, facing the storm.

  Narek did the same, steady as a granite cliff, rifle slung across his back.

  ‘Our fates?’ he said, his voice harbouring an unspoken threat. ‘You promised me retribution, xenos.’ Narek began to unsheathe the gladius he had taken from Prytanis’ corpse.

  ‘You will have it, or at least the means to attain it. Taking it will be up to you alone.’

  ‘If you are lying, witch…’

  ‘Then there will be nothing you can do.’

  ‘I’ll find you.’

  ‘I do not doubt it. Shall we?’ said Eldrad.

  ‘For mankind?’ asked Grammaticus as he was about to enter the storm.

  Eldrad nodded. ‘For the Emperor,’ he said dryly.

  Grammaticus stepped into the light and let it take him.

  They all did.

  Twenty-Six

  On Terra, hope fading

  At Plaintive’s Reach, order was failing.

  Originally built as an outpost tasked only with observation, the Reach had been amalgamated with the rest of the Imperial Palace as part of its upgraded fortifications. Several outposts like the Reach watched every approach, at least by land. A curtain wall conjoined each one, a massive gate set every few kilometres. Stout buttresses protruded from metre-thick ferrocrete, further strengthened by ablative armour plate. Watchtowers manned with sentry guns or sniper rifles had been erected. A garrison was raised, and pre-fab barrack houses built to harbour troops not on patrol on the wall. Swathes o
f earth were excavated and flattened for the construction of landing pads. Gunships were made.

  Lord Dorn decreed it, and the manufactorums of Terra’s immense industrial districts toiled ceaselessly to obey.

  The Reach was one of many, a sentinel wall, twenty metres high, bristling with guns.

  Refugees from beyond the great Palace confines thronged every scrap of land outside. They sought succour. Some were pilgrims. Others came for profit, hoping to leech off desperation and credulity. A few belonged to nomad tribes who lived a solitary existence, but had been driven by atavistic survival instinct towards the civilisation they so loathed.

  Standing on the wall, behind battlements of steel and stone, Vohan Gethe had seen every shade of humankind crawl from the wastes, disparate but all sharing in one thing.

  Fear.

  Of the Warmaster.

  Gethe had heard reports of worlds sundered by the renegade warfleet, of worlds broken by the mere rumour of invasion. Given the volatility at the Reach, manifesting as a sense of palpable discord that could spill into violence at the slightest provocation, he could well believe those reports.

  His enforcers manned this stretch shoulder-to-shoulder, the 87th precinct ‘Peacemakers’, and as their warden-primus he was responsible not only for them but also the poor bastards amassing below.

  A great clamour rose up from the base of the sentinel wall, reminding Gethe of his duty. Below, the army of the unwashed demanded entry.

  Gethe had no intention of acceding to such demands. At the Reach, his men were the first line of defence, part of the newly formed Adeptus Arbites, keepers of order and upholders of the Lex Imperialis.

  Behind him lay the sprawl of the Petitioner’s City, and the shadow of the great Palace itself. Though far away, its majestic spires and monolithic cityscape were easily visible, even out here at the extreme periphery. The statues of generals and primarchs loomed amongst the soot-stained gilt and ornate architecture. They held swords and banners, thrust proudly to the sun, or stood at either end of arched processionals where the teeming masses of Imperial citizenry scurried and hurried like ants in expectation of fire.

  Horns sounded often – a call to order, a signal of a labour shift begun or ended, a trumpeting of resolve and an urging to be stalwart in the face of a terror as yet unrealised.

  Gethe had dreamt of the spires of Terra, of its golden reaches, its triumphal squares, its memorial gardens, its great fountains and endless colonnades. He had seen little beyond the Petitioner’s City, and but a fraction of that besides. His duty had kept him on the wall, so he imagined what it must be like as he watched flocks of winged cherubim-servitors take roost in lofty bell towers or perch on the outstretched fingers of statues. It was as oppressive as it was breathtaking.

  Much of the beauty was fading. Even from the wall, Gethe could see it. The artisans must have wept, Gethe thought, when their murals and frescoes were torn down, replaced by plasteel and ferrocrete. Fluted spires were beheaded and turned into gun emplacements, ornamental fountains into ammunition silos. Some of this Gethe pieced together from what he could see through his monocular lens. The rest was all too plain to observe.

  Terra had turned aside its golden face and hidden it behind a dour, armoured mask. As grim as that was to behold, it was a different world entirely to the one that now existed beyond the wall.

  Horus was coming, so it was said. Though whispered, the news had bred a madness in some men that Gethe thought unnatural. There had been recent incidents, not just at the fringes, but within the Inner Palace confines too. Murder, purges, mass suicides, even rumours about cults loyal to the Warmaster had arisen in recent days.

  Terra’s resolve, or at least that of its common citizens, had become stretched.

  How long before it snaps? Gethe wondered. Perhaps it already has, and we just don’t realise it.

  The Imperial Fists remained aloof. If he trained his monocular lens on the distant Eternity Wall, he could see their golden forms, either stood sentinel or pacing back and forth. He wondered if they were restive. Did Space Marines even feel anxiety? They dealt with tension differently to ordinary men. Petitions had been made to them. And ignored. Or perhaps they simply went unheard, as one voice can become lost amidst a cacophony of screaming.

  Static gun emplacements surveyed the crowd. Augurs surveilled them. An army of enforcers stood ready at Gethe’s command. He did not feel confident they could marshal the sea of despair below them, and had often imagined it rising above the lip of the wall and crashing down upon its meagre defenders, sweeping them away, sweeping everything–

  ‘How many people do you think are down there now?’ asked Ebba Renski.

  Renski wore a charcoal-grey carapace breastplate over black arbitrator fatigues. Rank markings had been picked out on the metal in white. Sweat leaked down her neck from where her helmet slowly cooked her scalp, its flare visor slanted upwards as she sighted down a monocular lens, squinting against the low sun casting its blood-red rays across the Reach.

  ‘Last count, we were pushing fifty thousand,’ Gethe replied, pleased for a distraction from his maudlin thoughts.

  Renski whistled, lowering the spyglass.

  She stood with one hand resting on the pommel of the shock maul hooked on her belt, the other lifting her helmet a little to let in some air.

  ‘They have made another city down there, warden-primus,’ she said.

  Gethe did not doubt it. The refugees had been camped outside for the past two months, the masses agglomerating fresh followers by the day. Tents and other makeshift structures had sprung up during that time as the men and women camped outside the wall realised they would be refused entry and were likely in for a long wait before that situation changed.

  A crude society had developed. Vendors had come. Trade had been established. It happened fast, but it had done nothing to alleviate the pressure from the pilgrims at the wall, who jeered and begged and threatened, desperate to be let in.

  It was no different above. The atmosphere around Terra was ­choking with ships, and not just the monitors, augur stations and defence platforms; a host of vessels fleeing the advance of the Warmaster waited beyond the Ardent Reef, a shoal of monolithic gun batteries carved into the asteroid field girding the planet. The Throneworld represented perceived safety, hope of survival against the coming storm.

  Gethe had never seen the stars. He feared the void, and the snatched stories of rogue traders and wayfarers who had passed through Terra and travelled its reaches did nothing to allay that fear. He had spent his life in search of solidity, of permanence and order. The Lex Imperialis provided that. It had shielded him, but the beyond felt far closer than it ever had before. Not so remote now, the coldness of space. Even in the heat of the wastes, it chilled him. Gethe’s place was on the ground, on the wall. He clutched the edge of the battlement, and felt reassurance.

  ‘Anything else, other than the boiling of desert carrion and an atrocious lack of concern for hygiene, Proctor Renski?’

  The smell emanating from below reached as far as the top of the wall, losing nothing of its potency for the distance travelled. Stale sweat warred with urine and excrement. It was terror of what might come and the belief that the walls could protect them from it.

  ‘Nothing I can see from up here.’

  They had abandoned crowd sweeps when the sheer amount of refugees had made it logistically impossible. Anything could be building below the wall, and the first Gethe and his troops would know of it would be when it happened. The thought failed to improve his mood.

  ‘I could ask Nade to make a sweep?’ suggested Renski.

  Gethe rubbed his chin, and felt the need to shave. Bathing would not go amiss either, unless he wanted to smell like the wretches below. He nodded.

  ‘Do it.’

  The Valkyrie gunships stood at permanent readiness on a purpose-built landing pad s
ituated behind the wall. Air sweeps were generally conducted every few hours, but occasionally the frequency increased according to the prevailing mood of the crowd.

  At that moment, Gethe would classify that mood as volatile.

  ‘Just send up one. A quick pass, that’s all.’

  A few minutes later, the forbidding shadow of the Valkyrie was passing over the refugee masses like the spectre of death. Some wailed at its appearance. Others beseeched it, a roaring metal god of the sky. Most ignored it, or simply sneered.

  Nothing came of the patrol.

  Gethe felt old, his skin loose, his bones weary. War took a toll, or at least, the expectation of one did.

  Nade’s voice crackled over the vox-bead in Gethe’s ear.

  ‘Warden-primus,’ the pilot began, turning the gunship, on approach for the return leg.

  Then the Valkyrie’s engine exploded, shot out by an unknown attacker.

  A fading rocket tube contrail provided little clue.

  ‘Throne!’ Gethe rushed to the edge of the battlement for a better look at what had happened.

  Fiery debris rained down in advance of the flyer, which ploughed into the earth, churning the ground and cutting down a swathe of refugees like wheat. Dozens were killed. Even more injured. Panic set in, rippling outwards as shock lessened its grip, before the gunship finally came to rest in a burning furrow. People ran. Some were crushed underfoot. Fights broke out. Like an infection, the chaos spread. Distant gunfire echoed. There was screaming.

  ‘Nade!’ Renski was already on the vox, trying in vain to raise the pilot.

  Gethe could only watch as he smelled burning flesh on the breeze, which had uncharitably decided to carry the stench in the wall’s direction.

  He had been about to issue a command, when an explosion sent a tremor through the wall. Renewed screaming followed. The explosion had come from below, far enough away from the gunship to rule it out as the cause. Smoke and flame obscured its origin. More panic. More wailing, though the refugees had left the vicinity of the wall now. Those who could, those who lived or still had use of their legs.