‘Where were they?’ he asked.
‘There was a trapdoor set in the floor,’ answered Mandell as he moved past his sergeant and up the ramp. ‘Their parents must have hidden them from the orks just in time, perhaps alerted by the screams of the farmhands.’
Grimm nodded. ‘Time to pull out. Everyone aboard now.’
As the Space Marines marched up into the belly of the gunship, Grimm spoke to Riallo. As he did, the girls turned and hid their frightened faces against the Scout’s chest.
‘You honoured the Chapter with your deeds today, brother,’ said Grimm.
‘When we arrive back at the Cassar, I shall be petitioning for your advancement to full battle-brother status.’
Riallo blinked in surprise. ‘Then it is I who am honoured, brother-sergeant.
Thank you.’
Grimm waved that aside.
‘The Chapter needs you, brother. And many more like you if the Crimson Fists are to once again be a mighty force in this Imperium.’
He strapped himself into his flight harness and settled back. The gunship’s turbines whined louder, raising in pitch to a scream. Aetherius lifted her bulk up into the air.
‘On that day,’ Grimm continued, ‘no muck-eating greenskin in Imperial space will be safe from our wrath. In Dorn’s name, I tell you, the very thought of us will strike terror into their filthy xenos hearts.’
The others had removed their battle-helms. On hearing their sergeant’s words, they turned to face him as one. Eyes hard with rage and righteous zeal, they echoed him.
‘In Dorn’s name,’ they swore, ‘it will be so.’
I AM SLAUGHTER
by Dan Abnett
After a millennium of peace, the Imperium is beset by yet another
invasion. The Imperial Fists respond… and havoc ensues. The Beast
has arisen, and the galaxy will burn.
Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com
THE LIGHTNING TOWER
DAN ABNETT
What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?
There was once a fine palace, and it sat like a crown of light upon the top of the world. This was in the latter days, when mankind left his birth rock for the second time, to chase a destiny denied him in a previous epoch.
The artisan masters of the many rival Masonic guilds had raised the palace up, block by gilded block, to be a statement of unity, regal and unequivocal.
After a dreary, lightless Age of Strife, the warring tribes and creeds of Terra had been alloyed under one rule, and the palace was intended to symbolise that staggering achievement. All the petty dynasts and ethnarchs, all the clannations and gene-septs, all the despots and pan-continental tyrants, had been quelled or crushed, overthrown or annexed. Some, the smartest and most prescient, had offered terms and been embraced to the bosom of the new rule. Better fealty than the wrath of the warriors in thunder armour.
Better submission than the enmity of the world’s new master.
It was said that once you had seen Him, or heard Him speak, you were never in doubt again. He was the one, and had always been the one. He had been the Emperor long before there was any such office to take. No one knew His birth name, because He had always, naturally, been the Emperor.
Even the artisan masters of the Masonic guilds, famous for their sanctimonious craft wars and vainglorious quarrels, shut up and, in concert, built the palace for Him.
It was monumental. It was not so much an edifice as a handcrafted landmass. The artisan masters built it upon Terra’s greatest mountain range, and transformed the monstrous peaks into its bulwarks. It towered above a world laid to waste by centuries of war and perdition, and though that world
was being rebuilt, with wondrous cities and architectural marvels blooming in the new age of Unity, nothing could match its magnificence.
For it was beautiful, a euphoric vision of gold and silver. It was said that, when they had finished their task, the artisan masters of the Masonic guilds set down their tools and wept.
By the time it was complete, it was the largest single man-made structure in known space. Its footings sank deep into the planet’s mantle, its towers probed the airless limits of the atmosphere. It owned the words ‘the Palace’
wholly, without any need for qualification, as if no other palaces existed.
He had blemished that glory. He had raised dark curtain walls around the golden halls, and cased the soaring towers in skins of armour ten metres thick. He had stripped away the jewelled facades and the crystelephantine ornamentation, the delicate minarets and the burnished cupolas, and in their places he had implanted uncountable turrets and ordnance emplacements. He had dug mighty earthworks out of the surrounding lowlands, and fortified them with a million batteries. He had yoked platforms into synchronous orbits to guard from above, their weapon banks armed and trained, day and night. He had put his men upon the walls, armoured in gold and set for the coming war.
His name was Dorn, and he was not proud of his work.
Vadok Singh, the warmason, had a habit of stroking architectural plans as he laid them out, as if they were a beloved pet.
‘Necessity,’ he said, his favourite word, stroking out the revised schemata of the Dhawalagiri elevation.
‘It’s ugly,’ said Dorn. He stood away from the table, leaning against one of the planning chamber’s thick columns, his arms folded across his broad chest.
‘Ugly is what they will do if they find the Annapurna Gate weak and flimsy,’ Singh replied. He stood back and lit his boc pipe from a taper, allowing his flock of slaves to finish laying out the designs and adjusting the brass armature of the viewing lenses that would magnify details and project them onto the chamber wall for closer examination.
Dorn shrugged. ‘It’s still ugly. The orbis and lazulite work encrusting that gate took Menzo of Travert thirty years to complete. Pilgrims flock here simply to see it. They say it surpasses even the Eternity Gate in its aesthetic.’
‘Aesthetic, now?’ Singh smiled. He began to pace, trailing blue smoke from
the bowl of his long-stemmed pipe. His slaves followed him up and down the chamber, like a timorous litter of young following their mother. Singh was a tall man, taller than the primarch, but skeletally thin. His guild gene-bred their bloodline to favour height for purposes of surveying and overseeing. ‘I do so love our conversations, Rogal. They are quite contrary. You, the warrior, and me, the craftsman, and you lecture me on aesthetics.’
‘I’m not lecturing,’ Dorn replied. He was aware of Sigismund and Archamus in the corner of the great room, stiffening at the warmason’s use of his forename. Dorn would hear about ‘proper respect and protocol’ again later.
‘Of course you’re not,’ said Singh, ‘but it is a necessity. How many Legions does the Upstart have with him now?’
Dorn heard Sigismund rise to his feet. He turned and stared at the first captain of the Imperial Fists. Sigismund glowered back for a second, then left the chamber.
Dorn glanced back at the warmason. ‘Too many,’ he said.
Singh held out a long, spindly arm in the direction of the schemata. ‘So?’
‘Begin work tomorrow at sunrise. Dismantle the gate with care, and store the dismantled elements in the vaults. We will put the work back when this is done.’
Singh nodded.
We will put everything back, thought Dorn. When this is done, we will put everything back the way it was.
A katabatic wind was coming in off the lower bulwarks that night. The Palace was so immense, the precipice walls bred their own microclimate.
Greasy stars swam in the heat ripple of the Palace’s new reactors. The void shields were being tested again.
Not a palace. Not the Palace anymore, a fortress.
Some of those sullen stars were orbital platforms, catching the last backscatter of the sunlight as Terra turned. Dorn put on a fur-edged robe that had been in his possession since his adolescence on Inwit, and went out
to walk the parapets of the Dhawalagiri Prospect, to dwell upon its beauty one last time. It was one of the last sections of the Palace that remained untouched. Adamantium armour plates, drab prestressed rockcrete and auto-turrets had yet to blight its ethereal lines.
Soon, though. From the wall, Dorn could see the half a million campfires of the Masonic host, the labour army that would invade the prospect come sunrise with their mallets and chisels and cranes.
The robe had been his grandfather’s, though Dorn had long since understood that no ties of blood linked him to the Inwit ice-caste that had raised him. He had been created from another genetic line, that most singular line, in a sterile vault deep beneath him in the buried core of the Palace.
Not a palace. Not the Palace anymore, a fortress.
Dorn had been built to rule, built to assist in his father’s tireless ambitions, built to make the hard decisions. He had been made as a primarch, one of only twenty in the galaxy, engineered by the master architect of mankind, the archmason of genetic code.
The Imperium needs many things, but foremost it needs the ability to protect itself, to attack when necessary. That’s why I gave it twenty strong teeth in its mouth.
Attacking was a remarkably easy thing to do. Dorn’s physical prowess humbled all but twenty human beings in creation, and those twenty were his father and his nineteen brothers. In Dorn’s opinion, the real art was knowing when not to attack. His grandfather, the old Inwit sire, patriarch of the ice-hive clan, had taught him that.
Dorn had been the seventh lost son to be reclaimed. By the time his father’s forces found him, he had become a system warlord in his own right, ruling the Inwit Cluster as the head of the House of Dorn. His grandfather had been dead forty winters, but still the warlord had slept with the fur-edged robe across his body at night. His people had called him ‘emperor’ until the true meaning of that title had been demonstrated by a thousand warships in the Inwit sky. Dorn had gone out to meet his father aboard Phalanx, one ship against thousands, but what a ship: a fortress. His father had been impressed.
Dorn had always excelled in the construction of fortresses.
That was why Dorn had returned to Terra with his gene-sire. Out of love, out of devotion, out of obedience, yes, but most of all, out of necessity, damn Singh. The stars had turned over, and Chaos had spilled out from under them.
The brightest of all had fallen and the unthinkable, the heretical, had become fact.
The Imperium was attacking itself. The Warmaster, for reasons Dorn was quite at a loss to fathom, had turned upon their father, and was committing
his forces to all-out war. That war would come to Terra. There was no question. It would come. Terra needed to be ready. The Palace needed to be ready. His father had asked him, as a personal boon, to return to Terra and fortify it for war.
No better man for the task. No better master of defences. Dorn and his Fists, appointed the Emperor’s praetorians, could fend off any attack.
Below him, the halls of Terra were silent, and the walls deep. The only sound was the distant, eternal hum of the Astronomican. The Palace Dorn had armoured and defaced sat like a dark crown on the top of the world.
Rogal Dorn had built many of the finest strongholds in creation: the city fortresses on Zavamunda, the pylon spire of Gallant, the donjons along the Ruthan Marches. Impregnable bastions all, palaces for governor lords to rule from. None of them had been so essential as this fortification. None of them had been as painful to accomplish. It had been like blotting out the light or draining a sea. The bright glory of his father’s triumph, the enduring monument to Unity, had been entombed inside a crude shell of utilitarian defence.
All because of Horus, because of the brightest bastard son, the bringer of new strife.
Dorn heard stone splinter. He looked down. He had punched his fist, his Imperial fist, through a block of stone in the parapet. He had barely registered the impact. The block was pulverised.
‘My lord, is everything all right?’
Archamus had shadowed him from the planning chamber. Never so volatile
as Sigismund, Archamus was the master of Dorn’s huscarl retinue.
There was a worried look on Archamus’ face.
‘Just venting my emotions,’ Dorn said.
Archamus regarded the splintered block. ‘Making work for Singh’s artisans, then?’
‘Something like that.’
Archamus nodded. He hesitated, and looked out over the high walls towards the distant earthworks of the Mahabarat. ‘You have wrought a wonder, you know.’
‘I have ruined one.’
‘I know you hate it, but it had to be so. And no one could have done it better.’
Dorn sighed. ‘You’re kind, old friend, but my heart is lead. This should never have been necessary. I search the limits of my imagination, and still I can conceive of nothing that begins to explain this war. Pride and ambition, insult, jealousy? They are not enough, not nearly enough, not for a primarch.
They are too petty and mortal to drive a primarch to such extremity. They might provoke an argument, a feud at the worst. They would not split the galaxy in half.’
Dorn looked up at the night sky. ‘And yet, against all reason, he comes.’
‘Guilliman will stop him.’
‘Roboute is far away.’
‘Russ, then. The Lion. The Khan.’
Dorn shook his head. ‘I don’t think they’ll stop him either. I think he’ll roll on until he reaches us.’
‘Then we’ll stop him,’ said Archamus. ‘Won’t we, sir?’
‘Of course we will. I just wish–’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You wish what, sir?’ Archamus asked.
‘Nothing.’
The wind suddenly pulled at Dorn’s fur-edged robe. Above them, the shields went out and then test fired again.
‘Can I ask you a question, sir?’ asked Archamus.
‘Of course.’
‘Who are you really afraid of?’
Consider the question, Rogal Dorn. The first axiom of defence is to understand what you defend against. What are you afraid of? Who are you afraid of?
Dorn paced the halls of the Kath Mandau Precinct where the organs of the Adeptus Terra did their work. The Precinct, an entire city contained within the terraced compounds of the Inner Palace, never slept. Robed clerks and burnished servitors bustled along the broad concourses. Ministers and ambassadors conducted business beneath the kilometre-high roof of the Hegemon. The great mechanism of the Imperium whirred about him, its relentless function like a ticking timepiece. This was what Unity had brought, this and the near measureless expanse of worlds and dominions that it guided
and administered.
For two hundred years, the Emperor and His primarchs had fought to create the Imperium. They had waged the Great Crusade from star to star, to forge the Imperium of Man, an epic undertaking they had all made without hesitation, because they believed, with utter conviction, in the bright destiny it would shape for their species. They had all believed. All of them.
What was he afraid of? Who was he afraid of? Angron? Not him. Dorn would split his head without compunction if they came face to face. Lorgar?
Magnus? There had always been a foetid whiff of sorcery about those two, but Dorn felt nothing towards them he could describe as fear. Fulgrim? No.
The Phoenician was a singular foe, but not an object of terror. Perturabo?
Well now, their rivalry was old, the spiteful scrapping of two brothers who fought for a father’s attention.
Dorn smiled despite his mood. His years of exchanged insults with Perturabo seemed almost comical compared to this. They were too much alike, too jealous of one another’s oh-so-similar abilities. Dorn knew it was a weakness for him to have risen to the Iron Warrior’s baiting. But competition had always been a motivating force amongst the primarch brothers. It had been encouraged as a factor to drive them on to greater and yet greater
accomplishments.
No, he was not afraid of Perturabo.
Horus Lupercal, then?
Dorn’s aimless wanderings had taken him to the Investiary. In that broad space, an amphitheatre open to the night sky, statues of the twenty stood on ouslite plinths in a silent ring.
There was no one around. Even the Custodian Guard was absent. Lumen orbs glowed on black iron poles. The Investiary was two kilometres in diameter. Under the glittering stars, it felt like an arena, where twenty warriors had gathered to make their combat.
The second and eleventh plinths had been vacant for a long time. No one ever spoke of those two absent brothers. Their separate tragedies had seemed like aberrations. Had they, in fact, been warnings that no one had heeded?
Sigismund had urged that the effigies of the traitors also be removed from the Investiary. He had offered to do the work himself. This, Dorn recalled, had made the Emperor laugh.
For the time being, the traitors had been shrouded. Their towering, draped
forms seemed like phantoms in the blue darkness.
Horus, then? Was it Horus?
Perhaps. Dorn knew that Horus was the greatest of them, which made him the gravest foe. Could any one of them hope to best Lupercal on the field of war?
Martial prowess was hardly the point. Dorn had never feared an adversary in his life because of how strong he was or how hard he fought. Combat was only ever a test.
What mattered, what engendered fear, was why an adversary fought. What made him fight.
Oh, now we have it. Now the truth dawns. He felt the hairs on his skin rise.
I’m not afraid of Horus. I’m afraid of finding out why he has turned against us. I cannot conceive of any justification for this schism, but Horus must have his reasons. I am afraid that when I know them, when they are explained to my baffled mind, I might… agree.
‘Would you tear them all down?’
Dorn turned at the sound of the voice. For a moment, it had sounded like the soft growl of his father.
But it was just a man, a cloaked and cowled man scarcely half Dorn’s height. His robes were those of a simple Palace administrator.
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