by Nick Kyme
Eight cities stood upon its grey earth, built upon the ruins of the old, their tenements teeming with workers. Anwey, Umra, Ixon, Vorr, Lotan, Kren, Orll and Ranos – they were islands of civilisation, divided by many kilometres of inhospitable ash desert and storm-lashed lightning fields, raised up where seams of ore coveted by Mars were in their greatest concentrations.
Yes, Traoris was described by some as a blessed world. But not by any who lived there.
Though she knew in her heart it was futile, Alantea ran. It was raining hard, and had been ever since the ships of ebony and crimson had been spotted in the sky over Ranos. Underfoot, the rain-lashed street was slick. She had fallen twice already and her knee throbbed dangerously with the past impacts.
Alantea had been working a manufactorum shift, so was only wearing green-grey overalls and a thin cotton shirt darkened from white to grey by manual labour. A plastek coat kept out the worst of the rain, but parted as she ran. Her hair was drenched and hung down in front of her face in blonde clumps, obscuring her vision in the dark.
Phosphor lamps hissed and spat as the raindrops touched them. Shadows clawed away from the dingy light, revealing square structures of grey granite beneath them. The whole city was grey, from the fog that oozed from the foundry stacks to the stone slabs under Alantea’s feet. Ranos was dark iron, it was industry and strength, it was an engine that ran on muscle and blood.
It was also her home.
The phosphor lamps glared like beacons, hurting Alantea’s eyes. But she welcomed them, because they would lead her to the square.
If she could just reach Cardinal Square…
Heavy footfalls drummed behind her, a noisy refrain against the frenzied beating of her heart, and as she turned down a side street she dared to glance back.
A shadow. Just a shadow, that’s all she really saw.
But she’d seen these shadows tear old Yulli apart, gut her dutiful overseer like he was swine and leave his steaming entrails on the ground for him to look upon as he died. The others had died soon after. Throaty barks, accompanied by harsh muzzle flashes from thick, black guns, had ripped them apart. Nothing was left, not even bodies. The manufactorum floor a bloodbath; its various machineries destroyed.
Alantea had bolted for the gate to the yard. She’d considered taking one of the hauler trucks, until one of the half-tracks exploded, chewed up by a heavy cannon. So instead she ran. Now they chased her, those shadows. Never fast nor urgent, but always just a few steps away.
Fear was in the air that night. Talk was rife amongst the workers that men had been found and arrested in the culverts. Rumours abounded of strange doings, of ritual suicides and other ‘acts’. The clavigers had apparently found a missing girl with the men, or at least her remains. But what was worse was that the men were just ordinary citizens, workers of Ranos just like her.
So when the manufactorum was hit, paranoia and terror were already infecting its workers. The panic had been terrifying. But a different kind of fear seized Alantea now, one fuelled by the desperate desire to escape it and the belief that something far worse than death waited for her if she didn’t.
This district of the city was a warren, full of avenues crowded over with dirty tenement blocks that shouldered up against warehouses and silos. Alleyways and conduits gave way to labyrinthine side streets where even the rats lost their bearings. Except she couldn’t lose them, not her shadows. They had the scent of prey.
Ducking around a corner, Alantea sank to her haunches as she tried to catch a breath. It was tempting to believe she was safe now, or to give up and relinquish the chase. The city was quiet, overly so, and she feared then that she was the last surviving inhabitant, that Ranos was extinct but for her tiny life spark. She’d seen no sign of the clavigers, no dramatic call to arms from the shield-wardens. No response at all. What enemy force in all existence could achieve such a feat of absolute subjugation with barely any resistance?
A harsh, grating voice speaking in a language she didn’t understand got Alantea to her feet. She guessed he was talking to the others. The thought of a noose tightening ever so slightly around her pale, slender neck sprang unbidden into her mind. They were closer than before, Alantea knew it instinctively. She thought of her father, and the slow, cancerous death that awaited him. She remembered better days, still poor, but tempered with happiness when her father had been whole. He needed medicine; without it… A few more precious moments with her father was all she wanted. In the end, that’s all anyone ever really wants, just a little longer. But it was never enough. It was part of the human condition, to want to live, and when faced with our mortal end men rail against it to further that desire. It galvanised Alantea now. Cardinal Square wasn’t far. Another hundred metres, maybe fewer.
Dredging up whatever stamina she had left, Alantea ran.
Even with her injured knee she covered the last few metres steadily and at pace.
Bursting into Cardinal Square, gasping for breath, she saw him.
Rendered in gold – holding aloft a sceptre of command that would later be given to the Lord Excavator General of Traoris, patron of Ranos and the other seven worker-cities – he looked magnificent. He had come to her world, set foot in this very spot after the liberation, after the Traorans had been freed. He had spoken and all had tried to listen. Alantea was not born then. She had neither seen the one they came to know as the Golden King, nor heard his speech during the triumph, but sitting upon her father’s shoulders as he remembered back to what his father and his father before that told him of the liberation, she had felt the Golden King’s power and benevolence.
Something had changed since that day with her father. Standing in Cardinal Square now, she no longer felt that reassurance. It was as if something had arisen to challenge it and was even now worming away at all it represented. She could not say why. Perhaps it was instinct, that unfathomable intuition that only the female of the species possessed. All she knew was that a different blessing had fallen upon Ranos, one that felt far from benevolent, and its nexus was focused on the square.
Five points ran off from the square – though to call it such was a colloquial misnomer for it was actually pentagonal – including the one where Alantea was standing. At each of the other four she saw an armoured form blocking her escape. Phantoms at first, shadows, they advanced slowly out of the darkness. Edged in silver phosphor light their movements seemed almost syncopated and inhuman.
Turning back, realising her mistake, Alantea didn’t know she’d been stabbed until the feeling left her legs and she collapsed. Strong, armoured hands caught her before she fell and she looked up into the face of her rescuer. He was handsome, despite the strange script gilding his cheekbones and the exposed areas of his scalp that hurt Alantea’s eyes to look at. His black hair was short, shorn close to the scalp, and ended in a sharp widow’s peak over his forehead.
His eyes were pitying, but it was a cold pity, one usually reserved for the culling of cattle no longer fit for the herd.
Alantea whispered, using up a good measure of her courage to speak, ‘Let me go.’
The armoured warrior, clad in wine-red plate, festooned with chains and scroll work, slowly shook his head.
‘Now, now, my dear,’ he said, soothing, but seizing Alantea’s arms when she struggled, ‘that’s quite enough of that.’ He caressed her cheek with a long metal nail he wore on one of his gauntlets, drawing a thin line of tiny bloody jewels across her skin.
Whimpering like the animal he regarded her as, Alantea tried to answer, but the warrior shushed her, holding the bloodstained finger up to his slightly curved lips. Exhausted, unaware of the internal trauma her body was experiencing as a result of the knife wound, Alantea was powerless to prevent her head from lolling back. Vision fogging, she saw the Golden King, upside down and lashed by the rain.
As it ran across his face and down his cheeks, it looked as if he were
crying. In her delirium she wondered what could have upset him so, what could have instilled in a being such as he such profound remorse.
Chains were being looped around the statue by the other warriors that had entered the square. They heaved, a single gargantuan effort, and brought the Golden King down amid the dirt and the blood.
‘Don’t struggle, you’re bleeding…’ the warrior holding her told Alantea benevolently, before his tone grew darker, ‘and we must not waste a single drop.’
They were in deep, as far down into the catacombs as it was possible to go. The steady thrum of rock-cutters and the heavy bang of blasting charges was a constant and insistent drone and could be heard in the ruins above. It had been a battlefield, or part of one, frozen in time at the point of victory by order of the ruler of this world. The last bastion of anti-Imperial resistance destroyed by a storm of psychic lightning. Nothing had changed since the fortress had fallen. The ruins had been left as they were all those years ago. Untouched. They were a reminder of a glorious past, a place of commemoration and veneration.
Sebaton had violated the sanctity of that, besmirched it with hanging phosphor lamps, industry-grade digging servitors and the cluster of spades, shovels, cutters and excavation kit now strewn about the place. It played little on his conscience. Reality was, his conscience was so blighted already that such minor sacrilege would barely register.
Archaeology was not his strong suit, yet he could play the role, adopt the persona of Caeren Sebaton as needed. He knew they were close. He could feel it, just as he could feel the slowly deepening inevitability of what would follow their discovery and where, ultimately, it would lead him.
Dust thronged the air, making it hard to see in the dirt and the darkness even with the lamps. Surrounded by the reliquary of a time long past, Sebaton began to feel old. He looked up at the cavernous opening above, at the wide cleft of tunnel through which they had bored down to reach the catacombs, at the ramp down which they had ferried their equipment, and felt the desperate urge to climb. He wanted to be in the light, a keeper of shadows and lies no more. He resisted, his pragmatism far outweighing his whimsy, and asked, ‘How much farther, Varteh?’
The ex-Lucifer Black glanced up from the dig site where a pair of servitors were chewing up rock with their manifold tools, a tech-adept looking on.
‘We’re close.’
He spoke through a crackly short-gain vox-link, patched from a unit in his rebreather and received by the ear-bud attached to Sebaton’s own mask. This far down, this much dust, both men would have choked to death by now. The rest of Varteh’s team wore them too. Two men, ostensibly for security, flanked the dig perimeter. Both had lascarbines slung casually over their shoulders. Varteh carried a fat, military-grade autopistol in a holster on his left hip. He also had a long flensing knife strapped to his right boot.
All three men wore simple desert tan fatigues, bleached almost white by the dust, and cracked-leather jackets over plain grey vests. Varteh also wore a grey cowl that covered his ears and came up just over his chin. Sebaton could just make out his eyes through his goggles. They were hard; for Lucifer Blacks, even those who no longer served in the Army, were hard men.
Sebaton knew this from experience.
He was similarly attired, but wore a long damson-red duster coat with black tanker boots that went halfway up his shins. Sebaton’s fatigues were deep tan, pleated at the edges like an equestrian’s. He only carried one visible weapon, a snub-nose flechette pistol that fired tiny razor-edged discs and sat snugly in a shoulder holster concealed by his coat.
Glancing again at the opening that led out of the catacombs, Sebaton beckoned Varteh over.
His tone was insistent, ‘How long, Varteh?’
‘You expecting trouble?’ Varteh jerked his chin at the opening. Falling rain sparkled in the light. ‘Nothing is coming after us, is it? I can only protect you if you tell me what it is you need protection from.’
Sebaton met the ex-Lucifer’s gaze, and smiled warmly. ‘Anything I’m hiding is for your benefit, believe me, Varteh.’
Varteh frowned.
‘Something amiss with that?’ asked Sebaton.
‘Not at all. But ever since we met I’ve been wondering something about you. When I was with the Army, I travelled,’ he said, ‘Met a lot of men from a lot of different regiments, lot of different places. Until I made your acquaintance, I thought my knowledge of accents was fairly broad but I can’t place yours. It’s unique and yet also familiar. Not really one accent, but several. Therefore I’m wondering, where is it from?’
Sebaton’s smile faded. ‘A bit of here, a bit of there. Does it matter? You’re being well paid for your services. And I thought Lucifer Blacks were meant to obey and not ask questions.’
Now it was Varteh’s turn to smile.
‘I did, that’s why I’m in this shit hole with you.’ Varteh let it go. ‘Fair enough. We all have our secrets, I suppose. Yours, I suspect, are many.’
‘It’s because you’re a shrewd man that I hired you, Varteh.’ Sebaton looked back up at the opening.
Varteh took a step towards him and whispered, ‘What’s coming, Sebaton? What is this all about?’
Sebaton was staring. ‘What it’s always been about, Varteh. Weapons.’ He twisted the small ornate ring he wore on one finger, before returning his gaze to the ex-Lucifer. ‘Keep digging.’
CHAPTER TWO
Remembrance
‘What we do defines us. Our deeds are like shadows and depending on whether we run into or from the sun, they either lie behind us or before us.’
– ancient Terran philosopher, unknown
Kharaatan, during the Great Crusade
Smoke hung over Khar-tann City in a dark pall. It seemed to stick to its towers and battlements, drenching them in an oily gloom.
Fifteen hours of bombardment. Its shields had taken quite a battering. Parts of the city were demolished, but its main gates, its core walls and its defenders were still intact. Defiant. It was the first of nine major cities on One-Five-Four Six, or Kharaatan, as the natives called it.
Regarding the shadows that haunted its walls, its people unmoving as they watched the massive force sent to quell them, Numeon hoped the other cities would be easier to crack. He stood just over eight kilometres away on a rough escarpment of dolomitic limestone with three of his closest brothers. The Salamanders stood apart from the rest of the Imperial officers, who were farther back, camped halfway down a ridge that descended into a wide, low basin where their forces gathered.
‘It’s quiet,’ hissed Nemetor, as if to speak any louder would shatter the calm before the coming storm and pre-empt their attack.
‘Wouldn’t you be, facing off against the Legion?’ said Leodrakk. He looked up, craning his neck and pointing the snout of his dragon’s helm to the sky. ‘Two Legions,’ he corrected, though he could see no sign of their cousins.
Both warriors were Salamanders, yet could not be less alike. Nemetor was softly spoken and wore the emerald-green of the Legion, his iconography that of the 15th Company with a white drake head on his left shoulder guard. He was broad, with a thick neck and shortish, stout legs. Even out of his war-plate, he was formidable. It was partly the reason he was also known as ‘Tank’.
‘Perhaps they’re thinking about giving up, Tank,’ offered Atanarius, watching the city’s movements through a pair of magnoculars.
Like Leodrakk, he was armoured in the trappings of the Pyre Guard, a suit of plate fashioned in a draconian aspect with a reptilian battle-helm and scalloped greaves, pauldrons and cuirass. It was permanently blackened from Promethean ritual, and branding marks scored the metal in the Salamanders’ oaths of moment. Both warriors were taller than Nemetor, but lost ground in terms of sheer bulk.
‘Is that what your eyes tell you, Atanarius?’ Numeon asked in a deep voice. He turned, the fire-red crest jutt
ing from the crown of his battle-helm marking him out as their captain. He was also the primarch’s equerry, and that made him unique. Even through his retinal lenses, his gaze was penetrating.
Over the Phatra plain where Khar-tann City presided, night was starting to fall. Like hot embers in a fire, Numeon’s eyes blazed in the pre-dark. All of the Salamanders’ eyes did. It was a part of their heritage, like the onyx black of their skin and the self-sacrificial mindset of their Promethean creed.
‘Even through the scopes, it’s hard to be certain of anything they are telling me, Pyre captain.’ Atanarius lowered the magnoculars, returning them to his equipment belt, before facing Numeon. ‘I can detect very little movement. If they were planning on trying to repel our forces, then whatever measures they mean to use to do it are already in place.’
‘Eight thousand fighting men, plus twice that number again in civilians, some of whom may have been levied to bolster the troops,’ said Leodrakk. ‘Nothing they can do will prevent us knocking down their gate and cleaning house.’ He sounded belligerent as ever. A hot vein of magma ran through his skin and bone, as was often remarked by his brothers.
Nemetor cocked his head. ‘I thought you were planning on burning down their house, not cleaning it, brother?’
Leodrakk glared, cracking his knuckles inside his gauntlets.
‘Temper, Leo,’ Atanarius warned, before turning to Nemetor, ‘but don’t think your familiarity with the Pyre Guard allows you to disrespect us, Nemetor. Even from a captain, that won’t be tolerated.’
Nemetor inclined his head to apologise.
‘If you are finished goading one another then please attend.’ Numeon nodded down the ridge where several Army officers were slogging uphill, ‘I believe we are about to get some news.’
Numeon opened up a vox-link in his battle-helm.
‘Skatar’var.’
