Praetorian of Dorn

by John French

  ‘You are right not to kneel,’ said Dorn, and he turned away.

  Kye felt something cold in his chest. His arm and bloody fist dropped slowly to his side. He blinked, suddenly unsure what had happened or what he felt.

  Rogal Dorn stepped back to the table at the centre of the room and leant on it, eyes fixed on what lay on its surface. Golden armour lay on the black stone. Each section gleamed like the flicker of candle flames. Winged creatures, similar to those on the armoured giant who still stood at his shoulder, covered its plates. Kye could see talons picked out in silver. Red gems gleamed from eyes set above sharp beaks. Rogal Dorn looked at the armour for a long moment and then picked up a gauntlet. He turned it over in his hands.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ asked Dorn, his eyes watching the light flow over the gauntlet. He looked at Kye, who shook his head. ‘It is a gift. A gift from a father to a lost son. It is also a symbol, of unity, of purpose, of change.’ He put the gauntlet down on the table exactly where it had been. ‘I am the son, and the father, whom I did not know until now, is the Master of all Mankind.’

  Kye frowned. He did not know exactly what Rogal Dorn was talking about. He had always known that there were places above and beyond the hive’s smelting strata and the warrens beneath, but he had never seen them. He wondered again where he was, and how far he had come from those familiar places.

  ‘Gifts such as these have meaning,’ said Dorn, staring at the armour, and then at Kye. ‘I was an emperor. I ruled chains of stars, but now I am to be something else. Now I am not to rule, but to conquer so that my father can rule. That is what this gift means.’ He turned to Kye. ‘You are also a gift. You were marked and taken when the Emperor conquered your world. You would have gone on to serve Him, but now are marked to be among the first of a generation of warriors raised under my command. You are intended to be a symbol of a new age.’

  Kye looked up into Rogal Dorn’s eyes. They were as cold and unyielding as the stone beneath their feet.

  ‘Are you going to refuse your father?’ asked Kye.

  Dorn shook his head.

  ‘No. I gave him my oath when we first met,’ said Rogal Dorn, and then paused.

  Kye looked at his bloody hand. The blood had started to clot and bind his fingers together. He looked up.

  ‘You should have refused,’ said Kye. He could feel his limbs shaking and fought to control them.

  A frown passed over Rogal Dorn’s brows.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because defiance is all that life is.’

  Dorn’s silence stretched on, and then he seemed to shiver.

  ‘There is more to life than surviving,’ said Dorn.

  Kye began to shake his head.

  ‘I met my father, and I knew that I was no emperor. I knew what my oath to Him meant.’ Dorn pointed to Kye’s bloody hand. ‘I said that you should not have knelt. I said that because you do not know what I am. You do not understand what you would help create.’ Dorn turned and began to walk across the chamber. ‘There is something for you to see.’

  Kye hesitated for an instant and then followed. Behind him the silent giant in gold followed too, the haft of his spear tapping on the floor. They came to a halt beneath the centre of the vaulted ceiling. Dorn looked up and gestured with a nod. Kye followed his gaze. The engraved patterns on the bronze ceiling looked back. A low rumble filled the room, and then, one by one, the panels of the ceiling slid down into the walls.

  Kye stared.

  Light, endless points of light scattered like frozen sparks. Swirls of colour like patches of rust on black iron.

  He fell to his knees, mouth open, unable to stop staring. In part of his mind the old stories of sky and stars came back to him, and he knew that he was not looking at a myth, or dream, but truth.

  ‘This will be the domain of mankind,’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘This will be my father’s gift to humanity.’ He looked down at Kye. ‘That is the purpose I was made for, and why I gave my father my oath to serve Him.’ Kye felt weak, as though the ground had fallen away beneath him and he was falling without moving. ‘You will join me on that path if you wish, Kye.’

  He pulled his gaze away from the field of stars, swallowed and tasted the echo of his own blood in his mouth. All that mattered was that you never broke, never gave in, never let anyone take the only thing you could ever own away from you.

  ‘And if I won’t?’ he breathed.

  ‘I am not asking if you will give me your oath. You have a path to walk before that choice.’

  III

  They began with pain. Deluges of pain, pain that ate into his bones. There was no edge to it, just a sea of agony that went beyond the horizon. On and on it went, swallowing time. Seconds bled to hours. Hours collapsed to minutes. The past and future dissolved into a present that stretched and stretched. Red clouds billowed through the grey of his mind. The pain changed shape again and again, one second shrill as the edge of razors, the next wrapping him in fire. He could not hear. The pain had severed every other sensation from him. There was nothing left of him, just the core of torment rolling over and over through eternity.

  He was supposed to break. They wanted him to submit, to surrender, to let himself rise from the red ocean, clean and blank and broken. He could not remember even who they were, but that did not matter. All that mattered was that he would not let go. He would not give in. And so the pain went on. And so did he.

  And then it ended.

  He screamed at the shock. Cold blankness flooded into him, and he was flying through a void, tumbling end over end.

  This is death, he thought. It was not pain. It was the end of pain. It was nothing.

  And into the nothing came the voices. Hundreds of voices, whispering as he slid on through the void, just beyond hearing. Then colour replaced darkness. Shapes compressed, folded and expanded. Every colour he had ever seen was there, sliced into sharp slivers. Sometimes he thought he could see a pattern or recognise a shape, as though he were looking at a scene through rippling water, but then the patterns would splinter and he would pass back into the whirlpool.

  Light struck his eyes. He tried to blink, but could not. The sphere of colours and shapes vanished as abruptly as the pain. The light was white, simple and bright. It stung. His eyes were watering. There were shapes moving behind the blur in front of him. Something cool touched the skin under his eyes. His sight began to clear. He tried to blink again.

  ‘Do not do that,’ said a voice from just to his side. ‘Your eyelids are pinned open. Try to blink too hard and you will rip them.’ The speaker stepped into sight. He looked like a man, but a man if he had been shaped to a grander scale. White robes covered hard muscle. A starburst tattoo covered his bare scalp and face, and his eyes were grey and steady.

  Apothecary, Kye thought, though he did not know how he knew. Legiones Astartes. Solar privateer tattoo from pre-recruitment culture.

  ‘We will leave the pins in,’ said the Apothecary. ‘You will have another dose after the first implantation, and you will need your eyes open for that.’ He paused, mouth closing briefly. Kye felt the grey eyes flicking across his face. ‘And then another dose once you are past that.’

  Hands came up, and Kye felt a pressure he had been ignoring release from his skull. The device that the Apothecary lowered past Kye’s view looked like a helm. A mass of cables and bulbous machinery clung to its dome. Dozens of lenses sat in chromed wheels above where the visor would fit over the eyes. The Apothecary stood back and pressed a switch on a block of yellow plastek. The bindings holding Kye upright released, and he pitched forwards onto the floor. He lay there for a second, breathing hard. He pushed himself up onto his knees.

  ‘What’s...’ he began to ask, but his throat and lungs were raw. ‘What’s your name?’

  The Apothecary paused, looking down at him, the starburst tattoo on his face creasing.<
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  ‘My name is my own, and not for you.’

  Kye tried to spit, but his mouth was dry.

  ‘Most ask me why this is happening,’ said the Apothecary.

  Kye shook his head and forced words out of his throat. ‘I know why.’

  The Apothecary raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You want to break me,’ sneered Kye.

  The Apothecary shook his head, hesitated and then pulled him to his feet.

  ‘No,’ he said, and gestured at the rest of the chamber. Rows of metal racks stretched away under a vaulted roof of frosted crystal. A human figure stood at the heart of each rack, naked, bound by loops of plasteel. Helmets, like the one the Apothecary had taken from Kye’s head, hid their faces. Their bodies twitched as lights flickered around the edges of their visors. Tubes linked to their arms and chests. Kye could see the veins standing out under the skin next to where the needles went in. He rubbed his own arm and felt the puncture wounds. Many of the figures in the racks hung slack against the restraints. Blood streaked their bare skin. Servitors in red robes and one-eyed masks moved down the rows of racks, pulling limp bodies from the restraints and dumping them onto carts.

  One in a hundred survives the first phase. The ratio rose in his mind from the same place where his recognition of the Apothecary and the servitors had come from.

  The Apothecary pointed at a figure who fell from the rack as the bindings were undone. The youth was still alive, but barely. Blood ran from his mouth, and his eyes were rolling. His arms and legs thrashed wildy as he tried to stand, and then struck at the servitors. One of them put a thick tube to the back of the youth’s head. There was a dull thunk of pneumatic force and punctured bone. The youth collapsed, blood leaking from a neat hole in his skull.

  ‘That is what breaking looks like,’ said the Apothecary. ‘We don’t want you to break. We want you to be unbreakable.’

  ‘I won’t submit,’ growled Kye.

  The Apothecary looked down at him, and there was a glimmer in his grey eyes.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  IV

  They cut him. He was awake for most of it, and numb for some. They scooped out chunks of flesh and nested fresh organs in their place. A second heart began to beat next to the first. His blood began to change, began to thicken the faster he bled.

  When they had finished, the pain came back slowly until it was like a ball of barbed wire in his chest. He showed none of that pain. He knew something they did not, something that the cuts and new flesh and hypno-immersion could not touch.

  ‘You take this well, boy,’ said the grey-eyed Apothecary, as he examined the staples running down the centre of Kye’s chest. ‘Some die from this even after coming so far.’

  ‘Most,’ said Kye. The Apothecary looked up at him, grey eyes steady. Kye stared back, unblinking. ‘Most die before the end of what you are doing to us.’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ said the Apothecary.

  The architecture of his thoughts changed. He could feel it. Information and experience became cleaner. The gap between thought and action shrank. Pieces of emotion withered and fell away. His memories of what had happened before drifted into the distance. He could still see them, but they felt like something that was not really part of him any more. All the while, new memories filled his head, some sharp, some blurred and smudged. He knew more than he had before, but did not know how. The machines they clamped to his head were doing this, he knew, pouring change into his mind like metal into a mould.

  The pain got worse, but so did his capacity for it. The pain of surgery and hypno-saturation became islands in a wide and deep ocean.

  Time lost meaning. Life became the passing of different agonies.

  He saw no one alive except pain-fogged glimpses of Apothecaries. The only words he heard were the droning commands of servitors to move his limbs as they arranged him for the next phase of alteration.

  He did not refuse. He knew what they were doing. That was one of the first things they gave to him: the knowledge of what they were trying to make him. He let them. Death would be the only way to halt the process, but death was not victory.

  V

  They chained him to two others before they tried to kill him the first time. He had seen neither of the two other aspirants before. One was taller than Kye, and lean, with skin the colour of rust. The other was shorter, but with brands criss-crossing his corded muscle. Both had surgical scars that matched his own. Staples marched across the base of their necks and down their chests, like chromed parasites feeding on their flesh. They all had plugs in their arms now.

  The chains linked them to each other by the manacles around their necks. Each chain was long enough that they could stand at arm’s length from each other, but no further. The first thing that Kye had done once the servitors had finished was to test the chains. They were still warm from the welding, but did not yield. The other two watched him as he tried each link in turn.

  ‘They will not break,’ said the taller of the two, his voice a low purr. His eyes were half shut as though he were sleeping while standing. ‘You should know that by now.’

  Kye ignored the words. He was examining the walls of the space in which they all stood. Piles of debris dotted the metal floor. A rusting forest of girders reached up to a ceiling high above them. Now that the servitors had gone, the only light was the orange glow of heat vents in the ceiling. The air was thick and hot. He knew this kind of ground. He had grown, and lived, and learned to kill in places that looked just like this.

  He gave the chain a gentle tug. He was on one end of the chained trio. The tall one was on the other end, and the one with the brand marks between them. He squinted at the manacles on the necks of the others, and explored his own with his fingers.

  A clank echoed from the distance, then another, and another. The other two tensed, exchanged a look and slammed their shoulders together. The chains yanked Kye forwards, and he almost lost his balance. He recovered and yanked back on the chain. Something was coming. He had to get free and get moving. The other two staggered and swore.

  ‘What are you doing?’ shouted the taller one. Something howled in the dark, and more cries answered, rolling around the red gloom. Kye looked around. He needed a weapon. If he killed the middle one, then he could cut the manacle off, but then there was the tall one. He would have to kill them both and quickly. His eyes found a length of pipe on the edge of a heap of debris just a pace away. He just needed...

  The chain snapped taut and yanked him off his feet. He twisted as he fell, ready to lash out. An elbow met his face as his nose exploded into a red spray. He staggered and lashed out, but not fast enough. A hand spun him around, and he was on the floor, a foot at the base of his neck, the manacle digging into his throat.

  ‘Blood and night, he is from a fresh cohort,’ growled a voice from above him. The foot stamped down on Kye’s neck, snapping his face down into the floor. He did not recognise the voice, and that meant both the voice, and the foot on his neck, belonged to the branded aspirant. ‘You hear that, slime? That’s a pack coming for us, and you are dead weight on the chain.’

  ‘Let him up. There is no time,’ snapped the tall one. The pressure did not ease on Kye’s neck or throat. ‘Let him up, or we are all dead anyway!’

  The foot came off his neck, and he was pulled upright. The howls came again, closer, rolling through the gloom and echoing from the roof. The other two were not looking at him. They were looking out at the dark, at where the howls were rising. The tall one turned his head sharply, and his hand suddenly had Kye by the throat. It was fast. Kye had seen fast before, but this was something else, like the flinch of a spider.

  ‘You want to get through this? Then you are with us,’ he said.

  The other two were shoulder to shoulder, facing out. They had pulled metal bars out of the debris and were holding them in both hands.

 
‘Get in formation,’ yelled the branded aspirant, and tossed Kye a metal bar. Kye hesitated. His face was still aching. The howls were rising. ‘Now!’

  A creature of blades and muscle bounded out of the dark. Kye had time to see a hunched body, and loose skin hanging over ribs and legs. Then it was on them, steel fangs bright in a wide mouth.

  ‘Back!’ shouted the tall one, as he leapt away from the creature. Kye was slower and almost fell again. The creature landed in the space where they had been. It looked like a hairless cat. Skin hung in folds over whipcord sinew. Rusted metal scales covered its head, and its teeth and claws were shining blades. It snarled in frustration, tensed and pounced. A length of metal bar slammed into its open mouth. Steel teeth and blood flew into the air. The beast skidded backwards, two paces in front of Kye.

  ‘Kill it!’ roared a voice next to Kye’s ear. The beast was rising, metal claws scrabbling at the floor. Kye lunged forwards, swinging the bar above his head with both hands. The beast looked up, yellow eyes set in scales of rusted metal. Kye slammed the bar down, once then twice more, the impact thudding up his arm. Blood flicked across his face. The beast was a mashed ruin at his feet. He found himself suddenly aware that he was not even breathing hard.

  ‘Eyes up. Here they come!’

  Kye’s gaze snapped upwards, as a ripple of howls cut through the air. The other two aspirants were with him, one shoulder of each pressed against his, so that they were an unbroken triangle.

  Then the beasts were on them, bounding out of the dark, and the world became a whirl of jaws and the reek of rotting-meat breath. He swung and battered, thumping the bar into everything that moved in front of him. The beasts did not stop; they poured forwards as though driven by starvation or agony. He could feel the other two striking, but they never broke contact with him.

  He slammed the tip of his bar into an open mouth, and kicked the body away. A brief space appeared around him, and he glanced upwards. A forest of girders was ten paces away.

  ‘We need to get up into the girders,’ he shouted. ‘If we stay down here we will die.’