Praetorian of Dorn

by John French

  Myzmadra squinted, but could see nothing. Then she saw something moving across a slope. It was hunched, and walked with a loping gait that reminded her of a maimed dog.

  She glanced at Incarnus, but his eyes were fixed on the thing coming towards them. The pupils had almost vanished in his eyes. A pearl of frost gathered at the corner of his left eye as he reached out with his mind.

  ‘It’s not human,’ he said, his voice a rasp.

  As though in answer to his words, Phocron’s brothers rose, their guns levelled at the figure.

  The figure paused, its head cocked to one side under the fabric of its hood.

  ‘What word do you bring?’ called Phocron.

  Another pause.

  ‘Eurydice,’ said a voice. ‘And you?’

  ‘Calisto,’ replied Phocron. And then the warriors were running back across the slopes. The shrouded figure came with them, but now it was not limping, but moving with the same fluid strength as the rest. They reached the lighter and vaulted on board one by one, collapsing their watch on the hills until only Phocron remained, and then he was jumping onto the ramp and the lighter was lifting from the ground in a scream of released power.

  The figure that had joined them stank of ash and foul water. He was a giant, as tall as Phocron, but the newcomer wore only a ragged shroud over form-fitting recon armour. He slipped the hood from his head. His features were the smooth sculpture of strength that many of the Legion bore in direct echo of their primarch.

  ‘I am Silonius,’ said the newcomer. The ground was racing past beneath them now, the air roaring through the hatch as it shut. Phocron pulled the helm from his head.

  ‘You will call me Phocron,’ came the reply.

  Beside her, Myzmadra felt Incarnus staring at the two warriors.

  ‘Don’t worry, you get used to half of them looking exactly the same,’ she said.

  The lighter lurched, and Terra dropped away beneath them.

  Battle-barge Alpha

  The interstellar gulf, beyond the light of Sol

  The warships tumbled through the dark, spinning end over end with the momentum of the last thrust of their engines. No light shone within or without their hulls, and they had toppled through the void for long enough that ice clung to their bones. There were hundreds of them, some only half a kilometre from prow to stern, others vast cities of armour plating and weaponry. Seen from close enough that they were visible, but far enough that their shapes were hidden, they would have appeared as a cloud of debris, the remains of some ancient explosion, or collision of moons. From a distance at which their nature started to emerge, they became the corpses left by a storm or battle. The eye which moved close enough that it was weaving a path through the spinning hulls would have noticed that most were whole, and unmarked. But even then, neither eye nor sensor would have seen anything but cold, dead metal.

  The largest ship was called the Alpha, and it was a metal mountain range studded with weaponry. In a chamber deep within her hull core, a stasis field blinked out of being. The field’s generator had been sipping power for a year, draining its tiny reserve second by second, until nothing was left. The amount of power in the reserve, and the rate of drain from the stasis field, had been calculated so that it would fail at that exact moment.

  The figure who had stood within the field completed the blink he had begun a year before. The chamber around him was suddenly empty and dark. A moment before it had been filled with tech-priests and servitors, and the air had buzzed with static and the click of machine code. Now his senses reached into blackness and found nothing.

  A blue rune lit in his helmet display.

  Cold. Fatal levels of cold.

  He stepped off the stasis plinth.

  The sound of his steps rippled back to him as echoes. He paused, and let his mind adjust to a present that was utterly different from the past he had just left. He had entered the stasis field in the last phases of the fleet’s preparation, but even at that stage the battle-barge had been filled with noise and movement. Now there was nothing besides the sound of his own breathing, and the glow of his helmet display.

  He began to walk, his steps echoes. There was no need to rush; he had all the time that he could want. The door out of the chamber had been left open for him. Without power the pistons and locks would have held them shut to all but a melta-blast. It was the same for each of the other hatchways and arches he moved through. He passed a servitor after an hour. It had frozen solid midway through some task that it had tried to pursue even as the dark and cold had closed around it. White frost crystals clogged its eyes and covered the exposed patches of its skin. He left it to its never-to-be-finished task and walked on.

  The hoists and lifts were inactive, so he ascended by stairs and ladders, rung by rung, metre by metre. The chamber in which he had woken was far from the ship’s bridge. They had kept the bulkheads sealed, and so his path was through a labyrinth of vents. Dealing with counter-incursion traps also added time. There had been a minimal chance that anything would have been able to detect the systems running the stasis field, but they did not have to tolerate that possibility, and so they had buried him deep. It took him another hour to reach the command level.

  At last he dropped onto the bridge. It was utterly dark. Armoured shutters blocked the view of the stars beyond. The ghosts of datastacks loomed in the silence. Rows of machine-wrapped servitors hung motionless on the walls of deep trenches running across the deck into the unclear distance. The empty command throne sat above him, skinned in ice, glinting in the light from his eye-lenses.

  He moved across the chamber, finding the console he needed easily even in the dark. It was powered down and cold, but its initial operation was physical. The crank handle filled the dark with the rattle of chains and gears. He kept turning until the machine resisted, and then turned a series of dials set into the console. Somewhere beneath the deck a power reserve woke and began to siphon life into a very small number of systems.

  Lights flickered down in the machine-canyons, and a trio of servitors twitched as fresh, warm blood was pumped into their flesh. Out on the hull, a single communication array began to sift the emptiness for signals. It would not find any yet, but it was not expected to; it just needed to be awake and listening when the signals did come.

  The figure ascended the steps to the command throne, and sat. It would be a long wait, but as he had just passed a year in the blink of an eye, a few weeks more were nothing. Besides, he would not be alone for all of that; there was a Legion and armada to wake for war.

  But, for now, the hollow silence and darkness would be his, and his alone.

  Gift of the Father

  835.M30

  One hundred and seventy years before the betrayal at Isstvan III

  I

  The boy waited in the dark. The only light was the brief glare of a hatch opening when they brought him food. The light was bright, and he could not look at it without being blinded. After the hatch shut, he found the food by smell and ate it by touch. The light and the food were all he had to mark the passage of time in the cell. He kept count of both in his head. He had eaten one hundred and four times, and seen the light one hundred and eight times. The four times that the hatch had opened and no food had appeared had served no purpose that he could be certain of. Perhaps eyes had looked in at him. Perhaps it had some other meaning. Perhaps it had no meaning at all.

  He waited, slept and explored the edges of the dark. The floor, walls and ceiling were metal. Lines of rivets marked the seams between the slabs on the floor. There were twelve thousand, six hundred and seventy-eight rivets. He had counted them all by touch. None of them were loose. The door had hinges only on the outside. The narrow hatch at its base was without crack or seam. The cell itself was a cube, twice the length of his body on each side. Two small grates were set into the ceiling. A slow stream of air came from one, heavy with
the smell of oil and machine fumes. The other covered a light, or at least he guessed that it did. These details never changed.

  The only thing that changed was the song of the walls. Sometimes the song was a low rumble, like the pulse of a machine. Sometimes the walls were silent. Sometimes they shook like the case of a chain gun as it fired. Each song came and went, sometimes lasting for an age, sometimes rising and falling away quickly. The first time the song came he had beaten on the door and shouted. No one had come, and at last he had collapsed to the floor. When he woke next the song had changed. He listened to it and waited. By the time he had eaten one hundred and four times, the songs of the walls were almost all that he lived for, but they had gone silent now, and the hatch had opened twelve times since they had last sung.

  His latest bowl of food eaten, he fell asleep in the silence.

  When he woke he was not alone.

  A man sat against the opposite wall. A battered metal bowl and a candle sat at his feet. A broken morsel of bread lay in the bowl. He was thin, his skin pocked by scars where smelting sparks had burned it. Black hair hung to his neck. There were patches of grey in the stubble that covered his face. He looked tired, but tough, like an old knife that was still sharp despite the notches in its blade. He looked like some of the gangers who the boy had grown up with. He looked like the home he had been taken from.

  ‘You are not afraid,’ said the man, his voice rasping with pollution damage. The boy shook his head, not sure if the man had been asking a question. The man brought up a hand and rubbed his right eye. Strands of tattooed feathers criss-crossed his fingers. ‘Quite a thing, to not be afraid. Fear can be good – keeps you alive, keeps you sharp. But knowing what you are really afraid of, well... That is strength.’

  The boy looked at the man, taking in the marks which said to him that he was looking at someone who came from the Agate Vault. A gang boss too, with both blood and power to his name.

  ‘Why are you here?’ said the boy at last.

  The man shrugged.

  ‘Why are you?’

  The boy did not answer.

  The man picked up the bowl and held it out. The boy shook his head. The man shrugged again and put the bowl back down.

  ‘You were in a gang, right?’

  The boy hesitated and then shook his head.

  ‘No?’ The man raised an eyebrow, and the movement sent inked feathers ruffling across his skin. ‘You look like you were to me.’

  The boy shook his head again, suddenly cold. He felt his fists tense. The man watched him for a second.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘Yes. You’re right. There’s a difference, isn’t there? Even if you ran with them, even if you took the marks and killed with them, if you kept something back then you were not one of them.’

  The boy shifted, suddenly aware of the mottled burn scars on his hands and arms. The memories were suddenly bright in his head. The roar of shot-cannons; the weight of knife and pistol, heavy in his hands. The gang warriors had called him Kye. He had accepted the name, just like he had accepted the food, and later the kill brands on his right hand and forearm. Those had not been marks of defeat, though; they were just the price for survival.

  The man gave a small smile and shook his head.

  ‘Living and not surrendering, even if those around you thought they had won. Live quick and sharp. That’s right, isn’t it? Give just enough and no more, and never let the pain break you.’ The man nodded, his gaze steady. ‘Fast, and quick, and not afraid. What did you dream of? Never dreamed of dying? No, that would be surrender, wouldn’t it? But maybe a dream of getting out of the dark and living without a knife as your pillow? Yes, that is an old dream, old and false. Or maybe you thought that one day you could escape by being the one in charge. A few cuts here, some quick footwork there, and...’ The man smiled, and suddenly looked very old. Creases cut across the tattoos around his eyes. ‘And maybe you would have made it too – a gang of your own, a clan even. But no one holds power forever. A bullet or a knife would have found you, and that would have been that.’

  They held each other’s gaze, and Kye for a second felt very sorry for whoever the man was. There was a feeling of weight in his silence, like the pressure of unspoken moments piled up just before the present. The light of the candle somehow made the walls seem closer, but the ceiling further away, as though the walls just went up and up to the dark.

  If the man was a gang boss from Agate Vault, then he could have been taken at the same time as the boy. He had not seen the giants in iron take anyone else. They had just swept through the sub levels killing as they went. The boy had outrun them for ten days, until there was nowhere left to run to. He had tried to fight them. It had not worked, but they had not killed him. A blow from one of the giants had sent him down into the dark of this cell.

  The boy shook his head slowly, licked his lips and spoke.

  ‘You’re not really from the same place as me, are you?’ he said to the man. ‘You look like you are, you talk like you are, but you’re here for whoever took me.’ He looked up at the man, eyes hard in the flame light. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  The man gave a small smile.

  ‘Sharp and quick,’ he said, and let out a breath. ‘But no one put me in here, and I have been to where you came from even if I was not born there. I have seen the turf wars down under the smelting levels. I have been there when a bullet takes someone in the eye, because they were too slow, or too bold, or just unlucky.’ The man’s eyes darkened as he spoke.

  ‘You are a liar,’ said the boy carefully.

  The man laughed, and the sound ricocheted around the cell.

  ‘In a sense,’ he said. ‘In a sense that is exactly what I am.’

  ‘What do they want? Why am I here? Why did they send you?’

  ‘They want you to become something that you cannot imagine,’ said the man softly. ‘And I already said that no one sent me. I am here because I wanted to be sure my choice was right.’ He looked at the boy and nodded. ‘Still not afraid?’

  ‘No,’ said the boy, and for the first time there was an edge of defiance in his voice.

  ‘Everyone is afraid of something,’ said the man.

  ‘I won’t submit,’ growled the boy. The man smiled. A tattoo of a hound snarled on his temple as the skin folded.

  ‘That is why I chose you, Kye,’ said the man.

  The boy froze at the sound of his name. Needles of cold ran up his skin.

  ‘How...?’ He began to ask, but the cell door swung open with a clank of releasing bolts. Light poured in. The boy flinched back, hands covering his eyes. Heavy steps shook the floor, and a teeth aching-purr of machine power filled the air. The boy called Kye tried to blink away the sudden blindness in his eyes.

  ‘Stand,’ said a voice. He looked up, eyes stinging, moisture running down his cheeks. A golden giant stood above him, a bladed pole in one hand and a crimson cloak falling from its back to the floor. ‘Stand and follow,’ said the giant. The boy could feel his heart hammering in his chest.

  What are you afraid of?

  Kye looked down, past the golden figure to the other side of the cell where the man had sat. The space was empty.

  What are you really afraid of?

  He stood. His head barely came up to the golden giant’s midriff.

  ‘What is going to happen?’ he asked, his voice strong and clear.

  The giant placed a hand on his shoulder. The fingers were warm, like metal left out in the sun. Kye felt the power in the giant as he was turned and guided towards the open cell door.

  ‘You are going to meet your lord,’ said the giant as they walked out of the cell and into the light beyond.

  II

  ‘Kneel,’ growled the golden giant from behind him.

  Kye did not move.

  ‘Kneel,’ came the command again. Stil
l he did not move.

  He could not. He stood in a chamber of stone and black steel. It was as large as the largest vaults that he had seen beneath the smelting levels of his home. Glow-globes hung from the beams that ran across the ceiling. Each shadow glinted with polished metal and shaped stone. It was the most incredible structure Kye had ever seen, but it was not the room that froze him in place.

  A figure looked up from a stone table at the room’s centre. He was tall, taller even than the golden giant, but with a bulk that was perfectly proportioned to his size. Power flowed through his smallest movement. He wore black robes edged with white fur. Dark eyes glittered in an unsmiling face of hard edges beneath a shock of white-blond hair. Strength spread from his gaze like furnace heat. Kye had never felt anything like it before: not running into the gunfire of rival gangs, not in the time he had strayed into the grounds of the rust-cats, or leapt a crevasse.

  ‘What...’ began Kye, the question catching on his tongue. ‘What are you?’

  The golden giant began to growl a rebuke, but a glance from the figure silenced the words.

  ‘What I am is a matter that I am still coming to understand, but who I am is a question I can answer. My name is Rogal, of the House of Dorn.’

  Kye blinked. Every part of his being was telling him to kneel, to swear allegiance and undying loyalty to the figure who stood before him. But he did not.

  He brought his palm up to his mouth and bit down. The tips of his teeth opened his own skin. His blood was a brief taste of iron on his tongue. He held his hand out, squeezing it into a fist. Red ran between the knuckles. Rogal Dorn watched the blood patter onto the stone floor. His expression did not change.

  ‘You offer your blood for what?’ he said, and his voice was cold. ‘As surrender? As oath?’

  Kye shook his head, though every fibre of his being said to run.

  ‘As defiance,’ said Kye, the words thin in his dry mouth.

  The drops of blood from his hand were slowing, and the pain from the bite was fading into a warm numbness. Rogal Dorn’s eyes were fixed, unblinking and fathomless.