The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

As the glow died away in the cold Martian air, the battle-automata unit and the abominable intelligence that inhabited the machine retreated into the shadows. The Tabula Myriad was gone, and yet its legacy remained in the wily, fugitive Impedicus. Out there in the darkened wastes of the Red Planet, the Carrion realised that the best hope for the salvation of Mars had fled in order to preserve its own existence. Exterminatus was not the answer – this machine, the result of a thousand generations of heretek thought, was resistant to the insidious scrapcode, and the taint that came with it.

  It was among the first. Would it be the last?

  He was not alone in this revelation. Closing his claw and with a frustrated, vengeful anger smouldering in the crucibles of his eyes, Aulus Scaramanca turned his great body around.

  The Carrion could feel the Iron Warrior watching him, soaking up the misery of the Raven Guard’s every movement. The monstrous machine laughed no more – it needed do nothing else to end his former comrade’s life. The molten metal about them hissed and spat, and a hollow emptiness returned to the mill. As the Carrion’s systems and flesh failed him, the Knight Errant spasmed and grew still.

  It felt like Farinatus. Like being first butcher-baptised by the xenos breg-shei and then butchered again on the cybernetic slab as he was enhanced for further service. A service about to end.

  The Carrion felt the quake of Aulus Scaramanca’s armoured footfalls finally taking the monstrosity of his form away into the forge temple, leaving the Space Marine alone.

  Almost alone.

  Swooping down from a mangled stairwell, the cyber-raven Strix returned to its master. Landing on a shattered node-column, the bird tapped on the Knight Errant’s ruined plate with the interface pin of its beak, but the Carrion did not respond.

  TERRA

 

  End of Line

  The sun drifted down behind the monstrous fortifications of the Imperial Palace, its bleak radiance casting the crenellations and emplacements of its towering walls in silhouette. With them the hulking, armoured shape of the primarch Rogal Dorn became one with the battlements, one with the craftsmanship and the darkness.

  ‘Anything?’ he asked, his voice echoing through the wards and elevated courtyards. He had heard the whisper of trailing robes on the smooth stonework of the ramparts from half a league away. The swollen knuckles of Malcador’s hand creaked about his staff. Zagreus Kane’s workings marked the passing seconds like an ancient timepiece.

  ‘My sources inform me of a good deal of vox-chatter and troop movements across the southern polar ice cap,’ Malcador replied.

  ‘So your Knight Errant made it to the forge temple.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But,’ the Fabricator General said, ‘the Vertex remains intact. The planetary spindle turns and the magnetospheric shield protects Mars still.’

  ‘So the son of Corax failed,’ Dorn said. It was a statement, not a question, but the Sigillite felt compelled to answer.

  ‘Yes. It’s been too long – the Carrion is either captured or dead. I hope for his sake the latter.’

  ‘And for ours,’ Dorn said, his words harsher than he intended.

  ‘The abominable intelligence failed, as they are destined to do,’ Kane said, ‘and Malcador’s man failed with it.’

  ‘It was always a gamble,’ the Sigillite said. ‘It is the nature of gambles that they succeed only some of the time. It was still worth the risk – balancing the loss of one life against many.’

  ‘A life that could have been better risked defending these walls,’ Dorn told him.

  ‘And I’m sure that your brother Corax would have felt the same way,’ Malcador agreed, ‘but we are game players not rule makers, my lord. Pieces are risked and victories lost and won. For if the game is not played…’

  Rogal Dorn turned. His eyes were the darkness of bolt holes in stone, his unyielding features cracking about them.

  ‘Do not lecture me on the realities of war, regent.’

  ‘But this is not war,’ Malcador said, the last light of day probing his hood and revealing thin, drawn lips and perfect teeth. ‘Here we live the calm before the storm, the luxury of catastrophe before the fact. Meanwhile, this war is being won or lost beyond these walls, beyond these skies, by your brothers and their sons.’

  Dorn’s face darkened with a primarch’s wrath.

  Malcador smiled. ‘And I would not presume to lecture you on the realities of war, my friend. I would have you become part of them. War will come to the Solar System. Some might say it has already arrived. There is a traitor stronghold on our very doorstep – a stronghold destined to fall, should Rogal Dorn and his Imperial Fists set foot on the Red Planet.’

  The primarch looked from the Sigillite to Zagreus Kane.

  ‘The question of Mars is pressing, my lord,’ the Fabricator General said. ‘Please, I beg of you. The true servants of the Machine-God await the light of the Emperor’s Angels, not the fires of Exterminatus.’

  Rogal Dorn turned once more, staring out across the architectural wonder of a palace fortified. It seemed to calm him.

  ‘My father reached out for Mars once,’ he said. ‘To make Terra and the Red Planet more than the sum of their parts. At Olympus Mons we became one and took our unity to the stars. We shall reach out for Mars once more, and take back that from which we should never have been separated.’

  ‘The Omnissiah’s blessings be upon you, Lord Dorn,’ the Fabricator General said.

  ‘Your orders?’ Malcador asked.

  ‘Pass the word, regent,’ Rogal Dorn said. ‘I would have my captains assembled, and take their council.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ the Sigillite said before nodding his hood and turning to leave.

  As Kane and Malcador left him, the tap of the Sigillite’s staff punctuating the primarch’s thoughts, Dorn stared up into the deep darkness of the sky. The stars were coming out, and with them the distant dot of the Red Planet.

  Dravian Klayde – ‘The Carrion’

  Ordo Sinister

  John French

  ‘There are monsters, and then there are the monsters we make to fight them. Both are the same. The difference is simply a choice of how we see ourselves.’

  – the Emperor, at the Massacre of Angorite,

  late Unification-era

  The webway – now

  Borealis Thoon stands alone. Silence clings to the black and bronze of its skin. Its gun arm hangs at its side, its head still between its shoulders. Had it stood in a city, it would have made avenues seem as alleys, and tall buildings as low houses. Here, though – in the labyrinth dimension of the webway beyond the Emperor’s dungeon – it seems a metal giant pausing before walking further. A half-informed observer might see it and name it a Titan, and they would be correct in part. But this is not one of the god-machines of Mars.

  It is not a creature commanded by priests and raised in the image of the machine-god.

  It is a Psi-Titan, and it stands apart.

  The Lychway spirals away into the distance before Borealis Thoon. Through the eyes of the silent giant, the landscape resembles the inside of a conch shell. The walls are spun from twilight. Gravity follows a simple paradox here: every part of any wall is down. Every other direction is up. The humans who assign names to the webway call this the Lychway because of the pillars that line the inside of the spiral. Each of the pillars is a sharp tooth of smooth, grey ceramic. Crystal threads their substance. Voices whisper in the thoughts of those who have walked amongst them.

  There are ghosts, too. Some amongst the tech-priest orders have pict-captures of willow-t
hin figures standing in the shadow of their servitors. Standing and watching.

  Hydragyrum, master of Borealis Thoon, Fourth Initiate of the Fourth House, has seen the phantom images, but he feels nothing when he passes the pillars, and no whispers touch his thoughts. To him, the Lychway is just a place. Its pillars are silent, its ghosts absent. From his cold, iron throne, he watches and waits, just as he has for the last nine hours.

  ‘Surge approaching,’ says the voice of Tual over the vox, the Custodian’s words echoing inside Borealis Thoon’s skull. ‘Tide edge visible in six minutes.’

  ‘We hear, and awaken,’ replies Hydragyrum.

  Nine hours. He has been waiting for this moment for nine hours. The time of vigil is within the value that he had derived.

  He closes his eyes and draws three long breaths. He performs the action because it is ordained that he does so. He opens his eyes. In the distance, the twilight of the Lychway is curdling to crimson and black.

  ‘Argentis, saturnis, martias,’ he intones, and begins to slide the controls into the first set of alignments. The controls are unlike any other in any of the mundane machines of the Titan Legions. Hydragyrum’s throne sits at the centre of a sphere of steel rods. Pyramids, circles and pentagrams of gold, silver, lead, jade and bone hang from them. Apart from the cables clamped into the sockets at the base of Hydragyrum’s skull, the sphere is the sole means of controlling Borealis Thoon.

  It is called the crucible.

  ‘Numina, kadeth, ki,’ he says, and slides the control sphere into the next order of alignments.

  Beneath his throne, the three human system-governors are jerked into wakefulness. Each of them is almost a servitor, their brains cut so that alone they are just one third of a consciousness. Each of them bears the name of their function. Darkness is the first to wake. He shivers and hisses air from between his chrome teeth. The tubes burrowing into his eye sockets twitch. Hololithic projections unfold before the throne, meshing with the symbols of the crucible. Flowing runes and images cast new shadows across Hydragyrum’s face.

  ‘Tide visible in one minute,’ says Tual. ‘I hope you are ready.’

  Hydragyrum does not reply.

  ‘Tau, mementes, aurumina.’ His hands spin the elements around him. In the heart of the machine, power conduits open. Fire and coolant flood the larger systems. Borealis Thoon shivers. Chains rattle against its armour. On its back, the twin sets of tri-mounted turbo lasers pivot in their mounts. Sparks run over their barrels. The metal fist of its right hand flexes with a melody like the snapping of girders.

  Hydragyrum feels the sensations of his machine waking, and keys the vox link to Tual.

  ‘We wake, Custodian,’ he says.

  Beyond Borealis Thoon’s eye ports, the Lychway boils with light. Red clouds swirl out of the distance. Blue and pink lightning threads the air. The alien pillars are glowing with a cold blue. The stained cloud arcs above the Titan, crackling with darkness, breathing shadow.

  Hydragyrum watches it, knowing that a human would have felt terror, or confusion. He feels nothing, though. He is an empty vessel shaped like a living creature, but that is as it should be. He was the lodestone at the centre of the tree of death, the absence at the heart of annihilation, the null to the aleph of life.

  Daemons form in the red cloud, blurring with ragged shapes as they bound over the pillars and buzz through the air. Every shape of nightmare rolls in the murk: flayed hounds, spinning masses of limbs and light, rotting insects as large as battle tanks.

  The Lychway shakes. Pillars shatter.

  The governor called Silence whimpers from her place beneath his throne. Her mouth is sewn shut, her tongue taken. The whimper pulses through the Psi-Titan’s body instead, and Borealis Thoon roars into the oncoming storm.

  ‘Animus,’ says Hydragyrum, and turns the crucible into the first of its greater alignments.

  Deep in Borealis Thoon’s body, the sleepers wake. They have lain in their crystal coffins, dreamless, their bodies wrapped in amnion. Each of them is a psyker, and as each of them wakes, they scream. Psychic power lashes through the Titan’s frame. Lightning and frost roll across its skin. Unnatural energies rush though aetheric conduits and meet the blackness at the Titan’s heart. In his throne, Hydragyrum watches as the symbols of the four cardinal elements shift into alignment and begin to orbit him. Warp power is spinning around the darkness of his presence like a cyclone, accelerating and growing.

  ‘Aetherica,’ he says, and nudges the orbiting symbols into a different path.

  The power rolling over Borealis Thoon vanishes. A wave of stillness ripples outwards. The tide of daemons falters. Creatures of blurred fury and stolen flesh slow in their stride. Cries hoot through the air.

  At Hydragyrum’s feet, the last of the trio of governors convulses. This last human has no eyelids and his mouth is an open cave of metal. Interface cables slot into his skull on each side where his ears once were. He is called Pain, and as he screams without sound, Borealis Thoon begins to walk.

  The wall of daemons bends backwards, churning like the sea retreating from the shore.

  Blackness gathers in the maw of the weapon that hangs from the Titan’s left arm.

  On his throne, Hydragyrum waits until the control sphere is a blur. Then he sits back. A single, obsidian globe spins to stillness just in front of his left hand.

  The daemonic tide is rippling as the pressure pushing it forwards backs up behind its faltering charge.

  ‘Nul,’ says Hydragyrum, and taps the globe.

  The Imperial Palace – before

  The sky above Terra was blue. Pollution hung in a haze that ran to the edge of sight. Prefect Hydragyrum walked alone along the top of the Sinopian Wall towards the Anatolia spires. Sunlight caught the subtle patterns of thorns woven into the black fabric of his coat. A high collar ringed his neck. His head was clean-shaven. Silver plugs capped the mind interface sockets at the base of his skull. Black tattoos covered the left of his face, turning half of his sharp features into a mask of nightmare. Anyone who could look at him for long enough to note any such details would find no insignia or sign of office besides the lion’s head ring on his left index finger.

  And no one he passed looked at him. They turned their eyes and hurried away. If asked, none of them would be able to say why they did not want to look at the thin man in black. A lucky few would say that they could not remember him at all. That did not bother Hydragyrum.

  Outwardly, he seemed a human just like those that passed on his walk across the walls. He was not human, though, any more than a statue of a man was a man. He was inhuman. He was pariah. He knew this, and had known it ever since he had been old enough to hold a thought. He presumed that his family had seen it in him, which was why they had left him on the refuse range to die – the strange child with the eyes that made people shiver, and who did not cry when they left him to the wolves and winds.

  But, like everything in the pattern of the universe, he had his place. A place and a purpose.

  He walked on along the top of the walls. Lifter towers marched across the flanks of the defences. Huge blocks of raw stone swung up into the sky in the jaws of cranes. When the wind shifted, he could hear the rhythmic calls of labour gangs as they hacked and hammered at stone and steel. The Palace was different from when he had last walked under the sun. While war raged in the tunnels beyond the Emperor’s dungeon, a different face of the same war had come to the world above. Neither the war beyond the Golden Throne nor the growing fortress above had touched him in the buried stronghold of Borealis Chamber, far to the north. He and his machine had waited long to be called.

  He paused for a moment on the crest of a flight of steps, and spent exactly two minutes watching the flow of movement amongst the labourers. He would be on time even with this delay. The walk had helped him balance his body’s humours. That was good. He needed to be ready fo
r the debate. The wind skimmed the bare flesh of his scalp, and flicked the edge of his coat as he turned away.

  The sound of armour and active weaponry filled his ears as he began down the steps again. A giant in amber-yellow battleplate barred his path, weapon levelled.

  ‘Identify yourself and give reason for your presence.’

  Hydragyrum tilted his head. The giant was one of the Imperial Fists, a veteran, 675th Company, twenty years since induction according to his honours and unit markings. The willpower that the warrior was showing by confronting Hydragyrum was impressive. To look at him for so long must have caused the Space Marine actual pain.

  ‘Allow me to pass,’ said Hydragyrum. He knew what must have happened. The ring on his finger had unlocked every portal and door he had come across since he had risen from his chamber’s Arctic stronghold and come south. The Imperial Fists had noticed his presence on the wall, and backtracked to find out that he had gained access via a cypher key. They would not have been able to identify the key’s origin, and so they had come to find out who walked so freely in their domain. The fact that the access codes held in Hydragyrum’s ring were valid and exotic was likely the only reason that this warrior of Dorn had not gunned him down on sight.

  ‘You will answer, or you will die where you stand,’ said the legionary.

  Hydragyrum turned his gaze full on the warrior. The monster of armour and gene-crafted flesh visibly flinched, but held his aim steady. Hydragyrum turned his left palm over and tapped the ring with the tip of his thumb. A cone of holo-light sprang from the ring. The image of a lion’s head rotated in the projection, sunlight bleaching the image but somehow robbing it of none of its ferocity. Rings of data and information spun around it.

  The Imperial Fist gazed at it for a second, and then stepped back, dropping his aim and bowing his head briefly.

  ‘My apologies,’ he said.

  Hydragyrum lowered his hand, the authority of his ordo vanishing. He looked at the warrior for a second and then walked on without a word.