Age of Darkness

by Christian Dunn

  Some of the townsfolk began to weep, others cradled their heads and tried to deny the voice’s words. One man laughed, a humourless bark of utter disbelief. And then there were others, who looked on and said nothing, only nodding as if they had known all along that this day would come.

  Beneath the speaker horn, the marquetry boards ticked and clicked, the carved wooden slates turning about to form the shapes of the words. ‘The Emperor joins the roll of honour alongside his sons: Sanguinius, Dorn, Russ and the Khan. The remnants of his forces now sue for peace. Surrender is at hand here. The inter-Legionary conflict is no more. The battle for independence is concluded, and Horus has his victory. Even now, ships are being dispatched to all points of the etheric compass to cement his new rule as Imperator Rex.’ There was a moment of silence, as if the machine-speaker could not fully grasp the words it projected. ‘Know this. The war is over. Horus has the throne.’

  The speakers fell silent and the panic began to bed in.

  In the cool of the icehouse’s porch, Leon Kyyter’s gaze dropped to the upturned palms of his hands and he saw the line of little white crescents where he had dug his fingernails into his own flesh. He felt dizzy and sick inside. The youth was afraid to stand up for fear he might stumble and collapse upon the cracked blacktop of the mainway. It was a nightmare; it felt like a dream, there was no other explanation. Nothing else made any kind of sense.

  The Emperor, dead? It was impossible, unbelievable. The birds in the sky would speak High Gothic and the seasons would rewrite themselves before such a thing could happen! Leon refused to accept it. He would not!

  ‘Horus has the throne…’ He heard the words repeated by one of the grainwives from the Forroth farmstead. She was trying the phrase out, speaking it aloud to be sure it wasn’t just a string of nonsense words.

  ‘Will he come here?’ asked someone else, and the question was like a spark to kindling. Suddenly everyone in the town square was talking at once, voices rising in angry confusion. Leon was buffeted by fragments of conversation coming from all around.

  ‘...how long would that take?’

  ‘...already on their way...‘

  ‘...but there is nothing for them here!’

  ‘...could he be killed?’

  ‘...this world will fall under the Warmaster’s shadow...’

  The youth scowled and pulled himself to his feet, pushing away quickly, almost as if he could outrun the dark thoughts swirling in his mind’s eye. Terra on fire. The palace collapsing. A sky black with starships. A battle zone choked with silenced guns.

  He forced his way through the mass of people; there had to be hundreds of them, almost the entire populace of Town Forty-Four crowding into the open space to hear the voice of the weekly broadcast. Was the same scene being played out in every other township down the wires, from the capital, Oh-One, to the icewheat farms up in Eighty-Seven?

  Leon looked up and traced the lines of the telegraph cables with his gaze, the web of black threads dangling from the slender impact-plastic poles. The line of the weathered, bone-coloured masts led away out of the town and vanished across the endless landscape of barley fields. Beyond the limits of the settlement, the land was flat and featureless from horizon to horizon, broken only by the occasional steel finger of a silo or the lines of a railhead. It was a static, unchanging landscape, symbolic of the planet itself.

  Virger-Mos II was an agri-world, a breadbasket colony so far off the axis of the core Imperial worlds that it was almost invisible; still, it was one of hundreds of similar planets that fed a hungry empire, and in that manner, perhaps it might be thought, to have some minor strategic value. But it was an isolated place in the Dominion of Storms, ranged in the deeps of the Ultima Segmentum. A remote, unimportant world that turned unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy. There were less than a million people living on the second planet’s wind-burned surface, all of them working in service to farms in one way or another.

  And none of them could forget their place, especially those who lived in Forty-Four. Turning to face the other way, Leon’s view was immediately dominated by a tower of black shadow that rose from behind the service complex beyond the square, vanishing into the sky. Tipping his head back, the space elevator seemed to thin away to a thread’s diameter as it went towards orbit. Inside, automated systems that few human beings had ever seen worked without pause, gathering the cargo pods full of grain that arrived via the railheads on drone-trains, and carrying them up into space. The Skyhook was Town Forty-Four’s sole reason to exist; while there were farmers who nominally called it home, they kept mostly to their ranches. The settlement was for those whose lives revolved around the elevator and its operation; but in truth, their function was almost cosmetic.

  Leon recalled one night, when his father, Ames, had come home from the tavern in his cups and offered the boy a gloomy lesson; he told him that the town had no reason to exist. Every system inside the Skyhook, from the cargo handlers to the complex mesh of diamond ropes that hoisted the pods towards space, was run by automata. Every soul in Forty-Four could die in their beds at once and the elevator would run on, taking the grain and raising it high to where cargo lighters could meet it in orbit. The lesson, Ames Kyyter had said, was that even when people deluded themselves into thinking they were important, the reverse was usually the truth.

  The young man didn’t see it that way, though. He didn’t think of the shadow of the Skyhook as something to be detested, like his father did. The old man cast the tower like a monster, and he glared up at it each day, as if he was daring the orbital tether to snap and come down upon him. No, Leon saw it as a bridge to something greater, a monument to human endeavour. In the shadow he felt protected, as if somehow the aegis of the Emperor was captured in its shade.

  He had felt that way until today.

  Thoughts of his father drew Leon back down the shallow rise towards the dormitory house that had been owned by his family for seven generations. He was so intent on it that he wandered straight into a knot of people gripped in tense, emotive conversation.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you think!’ Dallon Prael worked as a senior solarman out in the vane orchard, where the light from Virger-Mos’s bright yellow sun was captured and turned into power for the township. He was a large man, but his size was all illusion; Prael was flabby and lacked any muscle or stamina, as Leon had observed over spirited games of pushpull at the tavern. His chubby hands wove in the air. ‘We all heard the telegraph!’

  Among the group, a handful of the assembled townsfolk gave Prael’s words nods of approval. But the man he was addressing grew a grimace across his face.

  ‘So what do you propose, Dallon?’ Silas Cincade put the question with force. ‘We stand around and fret?’ In contrast to the solarman, Cincade was tall and wiry, but his real strength was underneath his aspect. Silas’s elderly father owned the rover stables and his son worked maintenance on the vehicles there. Leon couldn’t recall a time when the man didn’t have grease-smeared hands or the scent of battery fluid about him.

  Prael and Cincade were tavern-mates, but here and now that seemed irrelevant. This wasn’t an argument over politics at the bar-step, but something else, propelled by fear. The tension in the air was strong, like the crackle of pre-storm static. Leon began to wonder if the two men might come to blows; not a week’s end had passed in the last two years that someone had not caused an argument on the matter of the civil war, and this pair were often at the heart of it.

  ‘You would rather we stumble blindly?’ Prael was demanding. ‘I spoke to Yacio. He’s telling me that every other telegraph channel has gone black. No connections coming in, nothing but silence.’ He folded his arms. ‘What do you make of that, eh? That’s military doctrine, isn’t it? Cut the lines of communication.’

  ‘What do you know about soldiering?’ Cincade snapped back. ‘The only Imperial Army garrison is in Oh-One and you’ve never
left this quad!’

  ‘I trained!’ Prael retorted hotly. ‘When the Imperial Army came here and showed us how to drill, I trained for the town watch!’

  Cincade opened his hands. ‘That would be the watch we don’t have and never needed?’

  ‘Maybe we need it now!’ said one of the others, a ginger-haired man from the medicae’s office.

  Prael nodded. ‘Aye! If I wasn’t here talking, I’d be dusting off my rifle!’

  The mechanic rolled his eyes and caught sight of Leon, looking to him for support. The youth could only manage a tense shrug. ‘Look,’ said Cincade, trying to inject a note of calm into his voice. ‘You know how the air goes. Lines drop out all the time.’

  In that, he was correct. Some peculiarity of the mineral-laced soil of the colony played havoc with vox-transmitters, meaning that communications were solely sent and received by telegraphic cables strung across the landscape, and here, up the side of the Skyhook. Without a wire, the towns on Virger-Mos II were reduced to using message riders or heliographs. The rich soil made it a wonder for growing crops, but the abrasion of it scoured the rockcrete walls of every building and made blackcough the colony’s worst killer. Sometimes the windborne powder was enough to chew through the shielded lines stretching across the countryside.

  ‘If the capital has gone quiet, there’s a rational explanation for it,’ Cincade went on.

  A woman, red-faced with near hysteria, glared at him. ‘You can’t know that!’

  ‘We need to protect ourselves,’ said Prael. ‘That’s what we should be thinking about!’

  Cincade grimaced. ‘All right, all right! How about this, then? I’ve got my trike in the stables. How about I drive out to Oh-One and find out what’s going on? I could be there and back before nightfall.’

  ‘It’s not safe.’ Leon said the words without thinking.

  The mechanic shot him a look. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The boy is right!’ Prael went on. ‘Throne and Blood, did you not hear the broadcast, Silas? The war–’

  ‘Is not our concern!’ Cincade replied. ‘We’re in the arse-end of the Imperium, where neither man nor primarch would bother to turn his gaze! So this sort of sorry panic is pointless. Better we find out what is happening from the colonial governor himself, yes?’ The man turned to Leon and gave him a light shove in the back. ‘Go on, son, get home. Look to your Da.’ He glanced up as he walked away. ‘And the same to the rest of you, too!’

  Prael muttered something under his breath as the red-faced woman glared after the mechanic. ‘He’s always swanned around this town like he smells sweet,’ she grated. ‘Now the grease-monkey is giving orders?’

  Leon became aware she was looking at him, waiting for the youth to agree with her. He said nothing and went on his way, heading back towards the dormitory.

  His father wasn’t there when he arrived. Leon took the stairs to the top floor two at a time, brushing his hand over the forever-closed door to his mother’s room as he passed it, as a matter of ingrained habit. At the landing, he went to the suite – it was a fancy name for the chambers, something that seemed too grand for just a nondescript bedroom-balcony-fresher combination. He rapped on the door with the back of his hand, calling loudly.

  ‘Esquire!’ Leon kept up the insistent pace of his knocks; there were no other residents at the dormitory house, and there hadn’t been for some time. These were the fallow months when the drivers from the far fields stayed at their ranches rather than venture in under the shadow of the Skyhook. ‘Esquire Mendacs, are you there?’

  He heard movement through the door and presently it slid open on oiled runners. ‘Young Leon,’ said the man, absently smoothing down the front of his tunic. ‘Such urgency.’

  ‘The telegraph–’ Leon spoke so quickly he stumbled over his words and had to gulp in air and begin again. ‘The telegraph says the Emperor is dead and Horus has taken Terra! The war is over!’ He blinked. ‘I don’t think it can be true…’

  ‘No?’ Mendacs wandered back into the apartment and Leon trailed after him. ‘Or do you mean you wish it not to be true?’

  The esquire was a slight man, his skin pale in comparison to the tanned natives of the agri-world, and he had long fingers that reminded the youth of a woman’s. Still, he carried himself with a kind of certainty that Leon kept trying to emulate. Mendacs had a quiet confidence that radiated from him; it was peculiar how someone who at first glance could appear unassuming, could also command attention if need be.

  He poured a measure of amasec from a flask on the table and glanced at where Leon stood. The young man’s hands kept finding one another of their own accord, knotting and wringing.

  Leon repeated the telegraph message as best he could remember it, the words spilling out of him. Emotion coloured every syllable, and he felt his cheeks redden and go warm as he reached the conclusion. Mendacs just listened, and took small, purse-lipped sips from the liquor.

  ‘Horus’s warships are coming here,’ Leon went on. ‘They may already be close by!’

  ‘One cannot tell,’ Mendacs offered. ‘The currents of warp space are strange and unpredictable. The passage of time there is somewhat elastic.’

  Frustration furrowed Leon’s brow. Of all the reactions he had expected from the esquire, this was not one of them. The man seemed almost… resigned. ‘Are… Are you not troubled by this turn of events? The war comes to us! The Imperium is in tatters! Are you not afraid of what will happen next?’

  Mendacs put down the glass of amasec and wandered to the window. His pict-slates and a quiver of stylus-rods lay there in an untidy pile. ‘It’s not that, Leon,’ he said. ‘Any sane man is concerned about the future. But I have learned that you can’t let yourself be ruled by questions of what may be about to happen. A life lived in the shadow of unfulfilled possibility is inward-looking and limited.’

  The youth didn’t understand the man’s meaning, and told him so.

  A moment of dismay crossed Mendacs’s face. ‘The dust storms that come during this season. Are you afraid of them?’

  ‘Not really... I mean, they can be dangerous, but–‘

  ‘But you understand them. You know you cannot change them. So you take shelter and let them pass, then pick up your life and progress as if they had never been.’ Mendacs made an inclusive gesture that encompassed them both. ‘We are little people, my friend. And the likes of us cannot change the course of wars that span the galaxy. We can only live our lives, and accept what fate presents to us.’

  ‘But the Emperor is dead!’ Leon blurted out the words, his voice rising. ‘I can’t accept that!’

  Mendacs cocked his head. ‘You can’t change that fact. If it is so, you must accept it. What alternative is there?’

  Leon turned away, shaking his head, closing his eyes. ‘No. No…’ He felt dizzy all over again, and stumbled into a drape partitioning off part of the bedroom from the main space of the suite. For a moment, he found himself looking into Mendacs’s sleeping area. He saw the low, narrow bed, the rail of clothes hangers.

  On the bed there was a case – the small valise the esquire had carried on a shoulder strap when he first arrived, Leon remembered – and it lay open. Inside lay not clothes or more pict-slates, but a conformal array of equipment that resembled nothing familiar to the youth. It wasn’t metallic and greasy-looking like the innards of a rover engine; it gave the impression of being fragile, like fans of black glassaic and silver filigree.

  But then the train of thought forming in Leon’s mind was abruptly forestalled by the harsh bark of his father’s voice echoing up the stairs. ‘Boy! Get yourself out here!’ He could hear the tromp of boots on the staircase.

  ‘You should go,’ Mendacs said, without weight.

  Ames Kyyter was at the landing as Leon left the room. He gave the other man a terse nod and then glared at his son. ‘I’ve told you before not t
o pester the esquire. Come on, down with you.’ He gave Leon a cuff around the ear and the youth ducked it, racing back to the lower floor.

  His father came at his back. ‘Where did you go?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to stay here, wait for me to come home. Instead I return and you’re gone.’

  ‘The telegraph!’ Leon piped. ‘Did you hear it?’

  Ames’s face soured and he shook his head. ‘That’s got you worked up, has it? I should have known.’

  Leon could hardly believe his father’s cavalier dismissal of the import of the message. First Mendacs and now him? ‘Of course it has! The war, Da! The war is coming here!’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice to me!’ Ames snapped back. ‘I heard the bloody spool. I know what it said! But I’m not going to wet my britches over it!’ He blew out a breath. ‘At a time like this, a man needs to be calm. Understand the import of the day, not run around like a damned fool.’

  Leon felt a wash of cold roll through him. ‘Da. What’s going to happen to us?’ He hated the way the question made him sound like a frightened little boy.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing,’ insisted his father. ‘You think the Warmaster gives a wet shit about this colony? You think he even knows the name of this star system?’ He scowled. ‘You think that the Emperor did?’

  Despite himself, Leon let his hands contract into fists. It made him angry when the old man spoke about the Emperor in that tone of voice. Dismissive. Disrespectful.

  He opened his mouth to answer back, but the thin scream of a woman sounded. Both of them went to the front door, following the cry, and there, out on the street, they found people pointing into the south-western sky, a new shade of fresh fear on their faces. Leon stepped out and turned his head to see.

  The low sun was at their backs, and the sky was a shade of deep blue, broken with a few long lines of grey-white clouds. High up, the moons were visible as ghosts, but what caught his eye were the lights.

  For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. They were lines of fire, thread-thin, marching slowly across the heavens towards the far horizon. There were lots of them, a dozen or more at his count. It was hard to be certain. They were reflecting sunlight as they fell.