The Fist of Demetrius

by William King

  ‘I go within,’ I say. ‘Make sure I am undisturbed.’

  I leave her absently-mindedly stroking the human with her blades. Its whimpers are a mixture of pleasure and horror and pain. She will keep her new pet alive for some time, I am sure. I turn my mind to higher things as I descend into the long darkness beneath the temple complex. I have a long way to go before I find what I am looking for.

  It looks like nothing. Even I, who know its significance, cannot suppress a feeling of disappointment. This is what I have come all these long light years for? For this I have travelled through the webways, absented myself from the intrigues of Commorragh and lost my high place among the Exalted? This?

  I stand in a large chamber, surrounded by defaced statues of extinct gods. Before me looms an archway large enough to fly a skimship through, except that it would be impossible. There is nowhere to go. The arch looks as if it is a carving emerging from the wall. It leads onto nothing but blank stone laced with shimmering crystal. Is it possible I have made a mistake, I wonder, that the ancient texts are wrong, that I have become the victim of some gigantic, cosmic hoax?

  I look at the archway again. On it are carved the faces of the twelve forgotten gods to whom this temple-site was once sacred. Even if I could name them, I would not. She Who Thirsts expunged their weakness from the universe when she took them into herself. They do not deserve to be remembered by the strong. We do not need such deities now, certainly not such feeble ones. We have become like unto gods ourselves.

  I strip off my gauntlet and touch the cool stone, feeling at those mask-like visages. I do not know what I am hoping for. There are no secret buttons or pressure plates to be depressed.

  I run my fingers over the deep veins of crystal within the arch, hoping despite myself for some response, some glimmer of ancient archeotech to come to life beneath my touch. Nothing happens.

  I glance around. For a moment, I have a sense of being watched. I wonder if it is one of my warriors, spying on me, hoping to learn something; Sileria perhaps. I see nothing, and my senses are keener than most. The sense of ancient, shrivelled presence remains. Perhaps the tattered wisps of the ghosts of dead gods still cling to this place.

  The time has come, I tell myself. I walk to the altar and place my hands on the ancient psychotropic crystals. They tingle beneath my hands, still responding to the ancient power of the place. I invoke the rituals I learned in ancient books stolen from the forbidden library. I feel a faint shudder in the crystal as the old powers awaken. Lights flicker. The earth quivers as if it is a giant beast whose sleep has been disturbed by an old nightmare. I have started the first pebble of an avalanche that will eventually bring the full geomantic potential of this place into focus and open the gateway. If all goes correctly, the seal will be broken and the ways beyond will become accessible within mere weeks.

  There are rituals that I must still perform, powers that must be invoked, but I have begun. I am one step closer to achieving what I have planned all these long centuries.

  I stand and contemplate the gateway arch, wondering whether I will really find the key to ultimate power beyond it. The texts hint as much. In this place, at this time, the ancients struggled to create a device that would be the ultimate weapon and the ultimate defence. The hints suggest that the Fall came before it could be tested but that they were close. If that is even only partially correct there is much I could do with their work.

  I smile, alone with the ancient ghosts, thinking that for once I have stolen a march on my rivals. No one else knows of this place. No one will come here before the gateway opens.

  If they do, I will destroy them. After I have taken my pleasure upon their broken bodies, of course, and taught them that there are worse things by far than the death they will beg for.

  Chapter One

  Exhibit 107D-5H. Transcription from a speech imprint found in the rubble of Bunker 207, Hamel’s Tower, Kaladon, containing information pertaining to the proposed beatification of Lord High Commander Solar Macharius and to the investigation of former High Inquisitor Heironymous Drake for heresy and treason against the Imperium.

  Walk in the Emperor’s Light.

  The huge warship rocked under the impact of a glancing hit from the planetary defence batteries. I could tell the Lux Imperatoris had only taken a glancing hit because I was still alive. The hull was still intact. My cold corpse was not floating in interplanetary space. For a moment, there was utter stillness, as if a quarter of a million men, the crew of the ship and all the Imperial Guard warriors it carried, held their breath.

  Above me, through the armoured crystal dome of the warship’s command chamber, I could see a world burning. Demetrius had been a globe of giant forests and ancient temples. Orbital strikes had set those forests on fire. As the wings of night swept over the visible face of the planetary orb, continents glowed fitfully. Occasionally the glittering contrail of a weapon blast leapt across my field of vision as the command ship added the fire of its own batteries to the assault. It had a terrible beauty to it.

  Demetrius was not the first world I had seen burn in the ten years since I had joined Macharius’s bodyguard, and I felt certain it would not be the last.

  All around us huge holoscreens showed three-dimensional topographical representations of this sector of the galaxy, across which the gigantic war machine of the crusade rumbled. Beneath each holoscreen were tables on which scribes and tech-adepts moved representations of armies and fleets. I had no idea exactly what was going on, but then I did not need to possess such a thing. The man for whom I was a bodyguard already knew all of that and more.

  The ten years since Karsk had not changed Macharius physically. He still looked like a warrior god. Some of the other generals were starting to show the signs of easy living and the spoils of victory on a galactic scale, but not him.

  The juvenat treatments still worked better for him than any other man I have ever met. He quite literally did not look a day older than when I first saw him inspecting the troops before we began our assault on Irongrad. His hair was still golden, his figure was still lithe, his eyes still resembled those of some great predatory beast. But there was a hardness about his features that had not been there when I had first seen him, a grimness that had grown since his encounter with the daemon that waited at the heart of Karsk. He had seen something during that encounter that had transformed him into an even more relentless conqueror of worlds, made him more determined to reassert Imperial control over all the sectors lost to schism.

  As he walked around the command centre he projected the same air of confidence that had been so striking when I first saw him. If anything, he seemed even more certain than he had back then, and he had every reason to.

  For ten years the crusade had enjoyed almost uninterrupted victories. It had reclaimed hundreds of worlds, bringing them back into the Emperor’s Light and restoring the true faith to countless billions.

  I doubt that I had changed much either. Since being inducted into Macharius’s personal guard I too had been given access to juvenat treatments, and they appeared to work pretty well for me. I did not feel any different from those early days on Karsk. The same was true for Anton, who stood nearby scanning all of the assembled personnel for any threats to the Lord High Commander. He still looked tall and gawky as a fisher bird in the deltas of the Great Black River. His green uniform with the lion’s head insignia of Macharius’s family hung on his body as loose as hand-me-downs on a scarecrow. The juvenat treatment had done nothing for the old scar on his forehead. It writhed like a centipede whenever he frowned or squinted.

  Ivan watched everything with a cynical glitter in the human eyes that peered out of his partially metallic face. His grin revealed sharp metal teeth, razor-edged. The juvenat treatments had not worked quite as well for him, possibly because his body was riddled with mechanical parts and this interfered with the technical magic of the serums. Of course, the quality of his augmetic systems was much higher now, as befitted one who was
the guardian of the highest warlord in existence. They obviously did not cause him quite so much pain as the older versions had, and he did not drink quite as much as he used to, at least not when he was around Macharius.

  We had come a very long way from our homes in the slums of the hive-world of Belial.

  The Undertaker watched everything with his strange, empty glance. He too was unchanged from Karsk. Of course, back then, he had been changed more than any other man I have ever known by the events we had witnessed. He had gone from being a junior officer on the crew of a Baneblade to the commander of the bodyguard of one of the most important men in human history, and it had not changed anything. Nothing ever seemed to. He watched everything with the same cold, blank expression he had ever since the days when the lieutenant’s brains had been splattered all over his uniform.

  We were not the only ones present responsible for Macharius’s security, of course. There were some who had been there longer, retainers of his family, summoned from his home world to replace the casualties of Karsk and beyond. They looked somewhat like Macharius. All of them had the same golden skin and golden hair. All of them looked like smaller, inferior copies of the great man made from a slightly degraded mould. There were men drawn from a hundred different worlds and a hundred different regiments, all of whom had fought for a position in the service of the supreme warlord of mankind. There were Catachans and Hemorans and Mordians and Telusians. All of them were joined in one brotherhood by their loyalty to Macharius and his crusade.

  The Lux Imperatoris rocked again as another blast came close. I offered up a prayer to the Emperor and wondered if He could hear me from His throne on distant Terra.

  A scribe approached and spoke to Macharius with the mixture of precision, formality and reverence that Macharius inspired in those around him. He was doing his best to ignore the shuddering of the ship and the possibility of instant death as he brought news of another victory. The worlds of the Proteus system had surrendered, bringing another three planets, ten hive cities and nineteen billion people back into the Imperial fold. Macharius nodded an acknowledgement, turned and said something to another clerk, recommending the general in charge of the campaign for some honour or other, and walked on.

  Two more uniformed clerks approached and saluted. Before they could even open their mouths to speak, Macharius rattled off orders, sending instructions to commanders who were five star systems away, instructing them on which cities to besiege, which worlds to offer alliances to and which governors to bribe. He had no difficulty dredging up any of this knowledge. It was all there in his head, all of the details of an infinitely vast campaign the like of which had probably not been fought since the Emperor walked among men. He ordered more reinforcements sent to aid them and kept on walking towards the furthest tables.

  Sometimes he looked up and gazed upon the surface of the burning planet with a look of longing in his eyes. I felt a certain sympathy for him then. Macharius was a warrior, born to fight. He loved commanding this great force, but I suspect he missed the thrill of physical conflict, the feeling of danger, of taking his own life in his hands. His thoughts were drifting to those final battles taking place on the world beneath us.

  I could tell that he wanted to be there. I could tell also that he had something else on his mind, something to do with his current obsession with prophecies and divinations and ancient relics that so exercised his mind when he talked with Drake. It was a topic that drew the two of them together, it seemed, although Drake has never struck me as a superstitious man. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Here on the galaxy’s furthest rim, superstitions were common. These worlds had been far from the Emperor’s Light for a hundred generations; all manner of strange, deviant and heretical faiths had sprung up, and all manner of weird beliefs had infected the populations. Some had even taken root among our own soldiers, although you would have thought they would have been immune to it. Clusters of prophecies had begun to gather around Macharius himself. That was easy enough to understand. The Lord High Commander appeared invincible, gifted with near-supernatural powers of foresight.

  There were some who claimed he was blessed by the Emperor. There were others who thought he was a supernatural being himself. Reports had started to arrive of shrines being set up to Macharius on dozens of worlds and not just by those unbelievers whose temples to false prophets had been overthrown.

  The ship shook. We looked at each other for a moment before we went back to pretending that nothing had happened. An officer in Naval uniform walked over.

  ‘A glancing strike to the void screens, Lord High Commander,’ he volunteered. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I am not worried,’ Macharius replied.

  ‘I doubt they could possibly know this is the Imperial command vessel,’ said the officer. He clearly was more disturbed than Macharius as the possibility that they did occurred to him.

  Macharius nodded and the officer pulled himself together, clicked his heels and saluted. As Macharius strode by, his mere presence seemed to reassure people. Worried frowns disappeared from the faces of scribes and star-sailors. Command must always look confident and that was something that Macharius managed supremely well.

  We made our way towards one of the great command tables with utter casualness. Indeed, so relaxed was our approach that I knew that we were approaching the spot in which Macharius had the greatest interest. I had learned to read the subtle signals of his moods by then. Or perhaps I delude myself. Few men ever truly knew what the great general was thinking.

  Ahead of us was the command sphere for the world we currently orbited. On its flowing surface was a representation of the continent we could see through the dome above us. Instead of being lit by the fires of burning forests, this showed representations of armies as glowing patterns. Ours were green. The enemy forces were red. Various runes indicated the composition of the units, ours glowing steadily to show we were certain of their composition. The enemy forces pulsed with varying speed to indicate the margin for error in our scouts’ reports on their position and strength.

  Around the table stood a variety of ranking commanders and Drake. He was in theory an observer but stood with the air of a man who was actually in charge, at least until Macharius arrived. The high inquisitor was tall and slim, with a pale, cold face and dark hair which now had a tinge of grey in it. Obviously the juvenat treatments had not taken so well with him, or perhaps he was simply much older than he had appeared when we first met and the drugs’ effects had started to weaken.

  I did not know much of the inquisitor’s personal history, and he never volunteered anything to anyone in my hearing, even Macharius. He was a man much more used to asking questions than answering them. Uneasiness radiated from his person to those around him, in the same way as confidence emanated like solar rays from Macharius.

  The high inquisitor looked up as Macharius approached and smiled. I suspect that Macharius was as close a thing to a friend as Drake ever had, if friend is a word you can ever use in the context of an inquisitor. I had seen too much of his business in the past ten years to believe that he looked at the world with any more humanity than the Undertaker did.

  Macharius nodded a greeting and went over to stand beside the inquisitor. The two men were of a height but otherwise were as different as two people could be. Macharius was physically powerful, Drake slender and ascetic and deceptively frail looking. Macharius wore the gorgeously braided uniform of the highest ranking Imperial Guard officer. Drake wore a plain black tunic and a scarlet cloak with cowl. Around him, a group of storm trooper bodyguards lounged like attack dogs. They eyed us as warily as we eyed them.

  Drake nodded to me, which was not something calculated to make me feel any easier in my skin. He had taken an interest in me since Karsk, as he took an interest in all those close to Macharius. Often I had been summoned to his presence to answer questions about the general’s moods and health. I had reported these conversations to Macharius, of course, a
nd he had told me to answer truthfully. He clearly believed that I had no secrets about him to reveal to the Inquisition that they did not already know, and I suspect he was right.

  Macharius turned to the tech-adept who stood by the command altar. ‘Give me a view of sector alpha twelve,’ he said. ‘Close magnification.’

  ‘In the Emperor’s name, Lord Macharius,’ the adept responded. He intoned a litany and moved his hands in some ritual gestures over the altar. We looked now at a three-dimensional map of a strange city. All around it was a clear, flat zone, where the forest had been burned early to provide a fire-break. The buildings were ziggurats, sheathed in metal, glittering in the light of twin suns. They looked as much fortresses as temples. They bristled with turrets and blister-bunkers and other fortifications.

  War raged. Men in the uniforms of the Imperial Guard fought with fanatics in the green and purple robes of the local temple wardens. Blood flowed in the streets. The natives fought stubbornly, with the courage of zealots prepared to die for their misguided faith.

  They were going to. So much was obvious. Inexorably, Imperial Chimeras and Basilisks and Leman Russ tanks pushed through the streets surrounding the stepped pyramids, moving in the direction of the gigantic central temple. Macharius looked at the colonel who had been liaising with the ground forces.

  ‘My orders have been conveyed?’ he said. There was a question in his voice, which was not like him. Normally Macharius gave a command in the full expectation of it being obeyed and then moved on. He did not check on subordinates unless something had gone wrong, in which case he moved swiftly and ruthlessly to correct the errors.

  ‘The ground commanders have been specifically instructed not to bombard the central temple. The soldiers know there is to be no plundering on pain of death and that demolition charges and heavy weapons are not to be used within its precincts, Lord High Commander. I made your orders very clear on those points. There can be no misunderstandings.’