Valdor: Birth of the Imperium

by Chris Wraight

  Samonas found this hard to follow. ‘Your pardon, lord,’ he said, wincing as his jaw clicked. ‘I am not sure I understand.’

  ‘I spoke to the Sigillite,’ Valdor said. ‘He is of the belief that our enemies indulge in games. Indeed, it is his judgement that they are bound by such things, which is both a weakness and strength to them. If we are to guard against them, we must do likewise. Generate threats, respond to them. Place our minds in the situation of those who wish to do Him harm. Let them in close, accepting the risk in return for the knowledge we gain. The stronger we become here, the more they will wish to bring us low. They have infinite facility – we must work to match that.’

  As Samonas’ mind gradually clarified, he began to see where this was leading. ‘War games,’ he offered.

  ‘Of a kind,’ said Valdor. ‘What did the Thunder Warriors used to say, when they were sparring? The contest to first blood. That is what we must aspire to, only with this Palace, this one body, as the prize.’

  Samonas began to feel light-headed. He guessed there were powerful neurosuppressors still swimming through his system. ‘It shall be done,’ he said.

  Valdor stood straight again. ‘Recover swiftly. There is work to be done when you are capable of it.’

  There was always work to be done.

  ‘As you command,’ he said again.

  And then, incongruously, there could be no doubt – Valdor actually smiled. It was not a smile of amusement, nor of scorn, but something like accomplishment, as if a winding road had finally brought its traveller to a long-promised destination.

  ‘You seem to have an affinity for the Dungeon,’ he said. ‘The labour will be arduous, but the place will not be left as a haunt of Astarte’s old meddling. The Emperor has a new purpose in mind for it, one that will make it, in time, the most secure location in the entire galaxy.’

  He withdrew, and as he did so Samonas felt his fragile consciousness began to ebb again. The recovery would be difficult, he could feel already.

  ‘The Imperium is born, the Palace is secured,’ Valdor said. ‘All it needs now, I believe, is a Throne.’

  Epilogue

  It had to be off-world. The way things were going, there would be no corner of Terra free of scrutinising eyes soon. It was like a claw-grip, gradually tightening, gradually closing off the remaining light.

  From the Palace she had gone quickly, making use of the skimmer taken from Kandawire’s vehicle pool. In all the confusion, it had been surprisingly easy to slip into the night and keep going. By the time everything had calmed down and security started to get ramped up, she was a long way away and still running.

  It had taken her only a few days to realise what she had to do. Off-world travel was rare and difficult to arrange, limited in theory to the Solar System sub-light network and the few intact mid-range routes beyond. After that, no one really knew how far it was possible to go, or what would be waiting for them if they got there. It was the great undiscovered vista left, now that the terrestrial field of imagination had been closed off so completely.

  It had taken a lot of coin and a lot of careful perseverance, but in the end she’d found herself in the hold of a swollen-bellied hauler on the apron of a shabby orbital port in the nominally free republic of Haradh-Nu. Everyone on board was nervous – it was clear that this trip was not entirely legitimate, even by the standards of such legal hinterlands – and they behaved as if Imperial enforcers would come crashing on board at any moment to demand idents.

  So she sat quietly by herself, her belongings heaped around her knees, checking the restraint-straps a hundred times and waiting for the countdown to begin. She knew the drill, in theory, but the practice still made her nervous. There would be a much bigger ship in orbit, she had been told. A starfaring vessel, one that had plied its trade even in the darkest of anarchy-ridden days and had overcome the worst the galaxy had to throw at it. Its captain was a man called, ridiculously, Alphoise de Ketasta-Phoel, who described himself as a ‘rogue trader’, which sounded absurd to her. Virtually everyone operating non-military starships worked outside the grasp of the Adeptus Terra, though that would surely change in the near future, and traders of any kind would not be allowed to be rogue for much longer.

  She waited, sweating a little, feeling the deck heat up as the engines cycled to launch velocity. She was almost certain that a well-built ship would not allow its decks to get hotter like that, but she was committed now.

  When the first boom hit, she started, clutching her armrests until her knuckles went white. A huge, crushing sense of inertia seized her, followed by a nauseating lurch into extreme speed. She saw the viewports raging with fire, and her seat shook wildly. That lasted for far longer than she wished for, and her stomach knotted painfully.

  Then, finally, the worst of it subsided, and the viewport cleared of its flames. She looked up again, still holding on tight, to see the starfield emerge and the grey-blue orb of Terra fall away. In the distance, she could already see the colossal hull of the Arquebus, hanging like an iron citadel in space.

  It would take them over an hour to reach it. And after that, it might take days before they attempted to clear orbit and make for the void. Everything beyond that was uncertain, but there was a little time beforehand to take stock, to reflect on what she was doing.

  As the worst of the shakes subsided, she unclipped her arm-restraints and reached for the device Kandawire had given her. It was still safe, still intact, though in all the long months of travel she had never dared access it. Now that she was out of Imperial control, even if only according to the letter of the law, it felt right to at least understand a little more. Her life was at risk, after all.

  She clipped the audex-feed to her internal comm-bead and activated a security field around the augmitter. Then she sat back, made herself comfortable and started the transcript rolling.

  In the void beyond, the rogue trader’s galleon drew slowly closer.

  ‘Maulland Sen,’ came a voice Armina had never heard before – sonorous, confident, articulate. ‘That is not a name I recall with any fondness.’

  She kept listening.

  For her part, Kandawire had headed across the high plateau for many days, quickly running low on the few supplies she’d managed to find and beginning to doubt she’d survive to see the lowlands. As it turned out, the world beyond the Palace borders was kinder than she’d hoped – she was taken in, offered food, even given places to stay by those who occupied the many urban settlements of the Himalazian massif.

  But she couldn’t linger. News of the abortive assault on the Palace filtered back along the transitways rapidly, and squads of Arbites enforcers began to make frequent patrols. Among the wider populace, shock gave way to a wary fear – a sense that the bad old days weren’t quite as far behind as everyone had come to hope.

  So she kept moving, joining the crowds of itinerants who endlessly headed both to and from the beating heart of the Imperium – the traders, the generals, the chancers hoping to build a new life and the burned-out cases hoping to forget an old one.

  No one recognised her. After a few days on the road, her environment suit became so battered that she might have been any old vagrant, and once the altitude got low enough for the climate to improve she discarded it for civilian clothing. She managed to access some of her old coin reserves from a semi-secure terminal in Ankandaa, which surprised her. Valdor could have had all that shut down, if he’d wanted to, and so clearly he hadn’t intended her to starve.

  After that, things got a little easier. She was able to hire a transport, and headed south-west across the boiling plains. As she did so, she remembered the trip to Ararat, its discomfort and its promise, and felt a prick of resentment. That already felt like a long time ago, in a world she had briefly been party to but was now banished from forever. The shaky flyers she had once taken for the sake of secrecy had been replaced by even shak
ier land-transports, and it was hard not to feel the force of the demotion.

  The days turned to weeks. The Imperium was continually tightening security, it seemed, and so passage-warrants between provinces became harder to get hold of. The last big test for her – the short salt pan crossing to Zanbar on the eastern ridge-coast of Afrik – was particularly troublesome, and she had to expend the greater part of her dwindling coin stash in order to avoid serious trouble.

  Once on the home continent again, though, she could relax a little. The smells of the old red earth, the dust in the air and the taste of charcoal from domestic burning took her right back. Everywhere she went there were signs of reconstruction and rebuilding, with whitewashed rockcrete cities rising up from the ashes of their despoiled forerunners. The Raptor Imperialis was flown proudly in these places, hanging listless in the hot, dry air but ready to flap wildly when the pre-rain wind boiled up out of the north.

  It even began to feel good, to be stripped of all the baggage of responsibility. She had no influence, no power, not much money and just the clothes she wore, and yet there was a strange kind of freedom there, like a weight lifted after a long time locked in place.

  She arrived back on a hot, humid night. The air was ripe with salt, and a stiff breeze was blowing from the east. Seeing the old places again after so long made her heart ache. No reconstruction had come here yet, and the ruins were more or less as they had been where the zooipa had left them, still black-edged and roofless. She walked down the old central street of the township, the dust clinging to her boots, and took in what remained of her childhood.

  No one was left, not even the scavengers. A few hunchbacked dogs slunked in the dusk-shadows, whining weakly, but they loped off when she brandished a stick at them. By the time she reached the compound, out on the edge of town under the shade of a clutch of gnarled marula trees, the silence was almost unbearable.

  She found her old room, open to the stars like everywhere else, and huddled into the corner. It even smelled somewhat familiar, despite the tang of ashes and the dung of the wild animals who’d made it their den before her. When fatigue caught up with her at last, she lay on her back and looked up at the stars, vivid and profligate in a clear summer sky.

  This is the just the start – already the ships are being built that will carry this army into the stars.

  That encounter felt like a dream, something that hadn’t really happened. This was where she had always been meant to be. Escaping had been a mistake – she should have remained with her father, told one another stories and rebuilt a life amid the dry soil.

  And yet, when she awoke the following morning, she saw that very little remained to be salvaged. If she wished to stay, she would have to start from scratch. She knew nothing of farming, and had no idea where the nearest intact settlements were. For all she knew, the place remained lawless, which had its dis­advantages as well as its advantages. She was not a fighter – that much had already been proved.

  Nonetheless, she did what she could. She managed to repair and activate the old water-purifier attached to the well out on the western edge of the compound. The power-unit in the generator had been looted, but she did find some tinned food in one of the old servants’ quarters, hidden under a mattress and wrapped in straw. She gathered kindling from the bush outside and dragged it back, lighting a fire that she intended to keep burning the whole time. You had to keep the wild dogs away somehow.

  It turned out that you could make a life here, if you were determined. Trader-caravans passed through from time to time, and she managed to find a few items of value that could be traded for seeds, fertiliser, dry goods, even a few out-of-date nutri-strips from Army supply depots. Still, she didn’t expect to last long. It would be winter in just a few months, and when the rains came the lack of a roof would no doubt prove ­troublesome. She spent most of her time sitting on the old veranda, the wood rotting under her feet, watching the big orange sun slide into the west while birds called to one another over the darkening bush.

  It was on one such evening, many weeks later, that she saw a man walking down the path towards the compound. His limbs looked out of proportion to his body, making his robes cling to him awkwardly.

  She waited for him to reach her, saying nothing. When he sat beside her on the veranda’s only other chair, she thought he looked horribly old. Had he always looked that old?

  ‘You haven’t done much with the place, kondedwa,’ Ophar said, stretching his long legs out.

  ‘Haven’t had the help,’ Kandawire said.

  ‘Ah, it took me a while,’ he admitted, grinning. ‘But I got out, just like you told me. Now I’m here.’

  Kandawire smiled. No doubt she’d hear the story in time, told at length, much of it embellished. ‘I’m glad to see you.’

  ‘I’m glad to see you, too.’

  They sat in silence for a while. As the western horizon turned slowly golden, Kandawire sighed. ‘I really messed it up, didn’t I?’ she said.

  ‘You were right about most things,’ Ophar said, shrugging. ‘There are soldiers everywhere now. Doesn’t matter who commands them – no one’s pretending that this regime is different any more.’

  She thought on that. ‘Perhaps it was always futile, though,’ she said. ‘I could have kept my head down.’

  Ophar chuckled. ‘You’re short enough already.’

  Kandawire took a swig from her drink – a metal can with salty processed water in it – before handing it to Ophar.

  ‘He wanted to talk,’ she said at length. ‘That’s what I can’t understand. He was ahead of us all the time, knew everything we were doing, and he still wanted to talk. He really didn’t need to do that.’

  ‘He was probably lonely.’

  ‘I don’t think they get lonely.’

  ‘They’re the loneliest people on the planet.’

  Kandawire thought on that. Then she reached for her drink again. ‘Planning to stay awhile?’ she asked.

  ‘I saw those fields you planted. Everything in them is going to die.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh.’

  The sun began to sink, rippling in the evening heat.

  ‘I was a High Lord, once,’ she said, ruefully.

  ‘And before that, you were mistress of this place,’ Ophar said, not unkindly. ‘You can be again.’

  ‘I just don’t want it all to be for nothing.’

  ‘That’s not for you to decide.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  Birds called out in chorus, crying eerily against the coming dark.

  ‘We’ll start building a roof in the morning, then,’ she said.

  ‘Just as you wish,’ said Ophar.

  About the Author

  Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm and Wolf King, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Lords of Silence, Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne, Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain, Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion, the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and many more. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Warhammer Chronicles novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works in Bradford-on-Avon, in south-west England.

  An extract from

  ‘The Passing of Angels’ by John French.

  Taken from the anthology Sons of the Emperor.

  ‘If gods did not exist mankind would conjure them into being.

  If god did exist He would will monsters into life and cloak them in the light of heaven.’

  – attributed to the Unspeakable King

  I do not want to be here. I do not want this present, and I want the future that follows it less. Yet the future is i
nescapable.

  My head is bowed, my eyes closed, and I listen as the present rushes past.

  The tick-buzz of armour servos…

  Breath vibrating inside the tarnished silver helms of the Host…

  Wind gliding across the skin of the Storm Eagle as it drops from the dawn sky…

  Fire feathering from the wings…

  The wind running amongst the clouds…

  And beyond that shell of air – silence…

  Silence…

  There, beyond the sky, is the only place where it is truly quiet. The song of the spheres is not a sound. It is that silence that sits between earth and moon, that marks the passing of comets, and sings the birth of stars. Heaven – from where the angels of an unenlightened past looked down on creation.

  ‘My lord.’ It is Alepheo. I hear the damage in his voice, the old wound to the throat, still healing. I hear the control, and the deference, and beyond that, pain. ‘We have reached the drop mark,’ he says.

  I open my eyes, and the world crowds back in through them, bright and dark and consuming. I see the Host of destruction. I see the scars and burns on their crimson armour. I feel my senses rush to enfold every angle of form, every mutable scrap of colour, every stutter of movement. On and on, each nanosecond a tableau, and each shift of hand or eye causing the universe to shatter and remake itself in my sight.

  There is so much in even the smallest moment of life, so much that humans cannot see. My senses pour down through layers of detail. There is tarnish on the tear drops that sit on the cheeks of Alepheo’s mask. There are five droplets. The second droplet is a micron out of alignment. The artisan who made it had been disturbed during the sculpting. The interruption had disrupted his equilibrium. It had taken a heartbeat for him to settle back to his task, but in that time the damage to his work had been done. I can see it in the error, and I can feel the flaw in my heart.