Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  This is pride. Pride in oneself is an affront to the Emperor. Pride in service is acceptable, but Mathieu’s pride is not the virtuous kind. He hates the blows of Valeria’s cane that come after his confessions, but he confesses to his sin often.

  He fears sharing his father’s fate more than he fears Valeria’s wrath. It is this fear, not that of the cane, that makes him work so hard. He loves Valeria for the route to a different life that she offers. And he loves her for her cane, because the pain makes him work harder.

  Service, pride and fear shape the clay of his soul.

  But there is one more sculptor at work. Mathieu has a secret that he will not share with the other children. Partly because he fears they will laugh, partly because he suspects he is not the only one and he could not bear that. Mathieu thinks Valeria is beautiful. Her physical allure is faded. Though she is not yet old she is not young either. Her face is lined, her eyes sunken, her hair dry; these are the wages of endless toil. Premature age afflicts everyone that Mathieu has ever known. Inside her, he perceives a light. He sees past her pinched expression, he sees the care she has for them, her desire for them to succeed and ascend the path education offers. She has faith, she loves the Emperor, and she loves them because they will serve Him. His young heart skips when she looks at him and gives the short, sharp nod of approval she reserves for success. He yearns for more.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ she tells him, as he learns the naming of the xenos, and the hatreds reserved for each kind.

  The Emperor does protect Mathieu. He remains while others fail and are taken away, to fates the children dare not discuss.

  The years pass. His desk seems to become smaller, though in truth it is he who is growing. His handwriting becomes surer. With every erasure of the wax, he scrapes away a little bit of himself. Childhood years are overwritten with the story of manhood. He takes and he passes the tests. The number of children dwindles as the first stage of childhood passes. It dwindles again as they approach puberty, and then again as they become youths.

  Five years, six years, seven, then ten. Mathieu knows the catechism minoris by heart before all the others. He advances onto the verses majoris before he is fourteen years old. By the time he is sixteen, he knows hundreds of blessings and psalms, his understanding of the histories of the church is deep and considered, and his reading of the tarot is bettered by only three of his classmates. Soon he will be seventeen. Mistress Valeria is older, just as he is older, but he finds her more heavenly than ever. When he thinks of her odd thoughts trouble him, and he retreats to the scriptorium where he may lose himself in illuminating the books the older children are tasked with copying until the thoughts go away.

  Four weeks before he is seventeen. There are twenty-three members of the class left. The rest fell by the wayside into other forms of service. Inevitably in some cases, surprisingly in others. Twenty-three men and women remaining from two hundred boys and girls. They are to be priests. Mathieu is joyous, he is proud. This new pride is of the acceptable sort. He has always been faithful. He has duties now, assisting in the cathedra, singing the plainsong that raises acts of worship from duty to elation, but of them all he most anticipates visiting the poorest members of society to hand out alms. Not because it amuses him – it is not amusing, it is gruelling, and humbling, and altogether awful. Very few people are wealthy, or even comfortable, in the Imperium. Most endure levels of poverty that would shock men from the least enlightened of prior ages. The plight of those rejected by this brutal system is terrible indeed. Mathieu finds a profound satisfaction in helping them, even if only slightly, even if it makes his own life harder. He gives away as much food as he can spare, though he has little to begin with. He gives away the cloth he is allocated to make his robes from. He becomes ragged. He gives away his sandals several times. Every time after the second occasion, he is whipped. The pain is validation of his actions. The recipients of his charity are suffering, so he too will suffer.

  Mathieu has found his calling.

  Fire alters his path. Fire is a rapid oxidisation. Fire changes materials from one state to another. Wood and bone are made into gas and ash by fire. But fire changes subtler things too. Fire can change fate. Fire can change a soul. Fire transmutes lives.

  Fire comes from the sky. Fire and death and blood. No world is free of strife. No life is free of pain. No human being is free from change.

  He is out on the agrifarms seeing to the bonded workers. He helps their bodies with gifts of food, he soothes their minds with beautiful words, and their souls are refreshed by his faith.

  The first he knows of the attack is the unnatural thunder of attack craft speeding down from orbit. They are quick and precise, knocking out air defences and communications hubs before they land their ground troops to deal with the pitiful opposition.

  They are Heretic Astartes armoured in blue and green. Their ­pauldrons bear the device of a many-headed serpent. Few in number, maybe twenty, they are more than enough to kill the company of soldiers guarding Mathieu’s town five times over. They butcher the garrison with contemptuous ease. They make a show of it, Mathieu thinks later. They linger. After they are done with the soldiers, they turn their attentions to the priests.

  They make for the scholam purposefully, and do unspeakable things there.

  Mathieu lives because the poor hide him. When he begins to run down the muddy, unpaved road, they tackle him to the ground. They restrain him. They drag him away and bundle him into a grain silo and they will not let him out until it is all over.

  It is brave, what they do, and would earn them a painful death if the enemy did not depart, their mission done, leaving all unharmed but the priests and the soldiers. They set fire to the Adeptus Administratum offices, and execute the chief official there, but leave the scribes. They make a speech. They are making a point.

  In the evening, the bondsmen release Mathieu. The first thing he sees is the column of grey smoke piled up on itself, its eastern side golden with the setting sun. It is so thick it seems solid and therefore impossible. The narrow base should not support such a rippled mass. He runs towards it.

  This time, the bonded workers do not stop him.

  There is confusion in the town. People are shocked, but they are grateful to be alive. Help has not yet come from other towns, and Mathieu wonders dimly if similar acts have been committed elsewhere on the planet.

  That is a concern for later. First, he must see what has become of his fellows.

  He must see what has become of Valeria.

  He hurries up the hill, along streets whose river of cobbles make cart wheels roar. He goes into the great quadrangle of the seminary, and passes through the portal into its scholam. The doors have been ripped off their hinges.

  The smell of smoke and meat mingle. Mathieu is hungry and his mouth responds automatically with a flood of saliva. He is ashamed.

  The roof has fallen in. The first stars are coming out where frescos of the Emperor were. The timbers of the scholam still give out a little heat.

  The younger pupils have been spared. They are variously hiding, or roaming around in shock, or weeping outside, but the older ones, those into the first years of manhood and womanhood, are all among the slaughtered. Mathieu’s classmates are dead. They have been butchered imaginatively. The enemy were cruel, but they saved their most fiendish inventiveness for the mistress of the house, she who had turned empty vessels like Mathieu into priests, filling them up with the Emperor’s love.

  His precious Valeria is in the middle of the corpses of her students, nailed to a chair painted a gaudy yellow. Her body has been opened from crotch to neck, the organs removed, so she looks like a bag with a red lining tastelessly made in a woman’s semblance, rather than herself. Upon her forehead is carved, in a shockingly neat hand, ‘Deus Imperator’.

  When he sees this, Mathieu falls to his knees in the mixed ash and blood, and he weeps.<
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  ‘Look at me,’ says a voice.

  Mathieu does not look up. He is too caught up in anguish. Valeria is dead. His love, his inspiration.

  ‘Look at me,’ the voice commands.

  This time Mathieu cannot help but obey. He has no choice. He turns slowly.

  There is a figure behind him in the scholam portal. Golden and bright, it turns ash into treasure and the ruin into a palace. The figure is out of place in this memory. An aura of perfect light burns from it so dazzlingly Mathieu cannot discern any detail. Nevertheless, he thinks he knows who it is. His heart almost stops.

  ‘Behold me, and pay heed, priest,’ says the being. His voice is sweet thunder. His words are blissful pain. ‘Through the agony of your memories and the sting of your dreams I speak to you. Mark this well. On Parmenio, I am. Find me, use me, and victory shall be assured.’

  Before the figure vanishes, or before Mathieu wakes up – he is not sure which of those things happen, if either of them – he catches a glimpse of someone else. A young girl, not a child, but barely a woman. He can look at her clearly. He can see her, though the hurtful light burns from her eyes as hot as a plasma forge.

  ‘Find her, find me,’ says the girl.

  Then Mathieu awakes in his chambers, and the past has become the past once again.

  It is in the nature of nightmares to disrupt a man’s mind. Mathieu could not rest after the dream. He prayed awhile, and subjected himself to the cleansing pain of auto-flagellation for his remembered longing for Valeria. None of it helped. Finally, when the sixth watch klaxon rang, he scooped up Valeria’s skull without engaging its mechanisms, and headed for the one place where he would not be disturbed.

  ‘They have breached the hull. They are here.’

  They were Sicarius’ last words. After he had spoken those two, short sentences, his world had changed, and he had changed with it. He was no longer who he had been. He wore the same face, and carried the same name, but he was a different man.

  He was a man who still heard the screams.

  It did not used to be that way. His had always been a world of screams. Screeching xenos, wailing heretics, shrieking monsters to defy the imagination of mankind in the breadth of their horror and the heights of their malice. Dead or dying at his will, at his order, by his hand. Ruptured into extinction by the application of bolt, boot and sword. Deaths, endless and innumerable deaths, they soaked his soul through and through in blood and pain.

  Sicarius never remembered the screams of those who died before the rift. He was righteous in their making. They did not trouble him. Those deaths were just.

  But the screams of his men – those he could not forget, and they troubled him deeply.

  Bitter saliva leaked from his Betcher’s Gland. He swallowed the slow issue of his own poisons. The screams rang in his head. The high screaming of Space Marines in the red claws of agony. He expected normal men without the benefits of Adeptus Astartes gifts to shrill so keenly when faced with death, but his brothers?

  He closed his eyes, bowed his head. He enumerated the dead, remembering those lost in the warp, and asked, foolishly perhaps, for the Emperor’s forgiveness.

  A deep trance enveloped him. He remembered his brothers’ faces and forced himself to live their individual deaths again as he fired and fell back, helpless to aid them. Immersed in past horrors, he only heard the priest at the last moment, and only when he coughed quietly to alert Sicarius he was no longer alone on the observation deck.

  Sicarius looked up sharply with red-rimmed eyes.

  Mathieu was a slender man, deceptively feeble in build, appearing almost a youth. He had the earnestness of a man yet to reach his thirtieth year, with the blend of hope and despair that marked out those who wanted to change the galaxy, but who could never coax the uncaring stars to move. Sicarius had seen him fight, and knew the strength concealed beneath Mathieu’s patched robe. He had seen him speak. Mathieu was a rare man the stars might heed.

  Sicarius twitched the fancy away as unworthy. Mathieu was a man, Sicarius a Space Marine, and yet…

  Mathieu’s hair was shaved around the sides of his head, long and greased tall on top. This flopped over into Mathieu’s face, obscuring one of his eyes without diminishing his gaze. Mathieu had an uncomfortable gaze. It implied no judgment, but left Sicarius feeling wanting. Mathieu was cradling his servo-skull. Had it been active Sicarius would have assuredly heard the priest approach, but he carried it carefully in his hands, its systems powered down. The long fingers of one of Mathieu’s hands wrapped around ivory bone. The others idly traced the HV engraved into the forehead. The fingers too looked weak, the fingers of an aesthete, suitable for moving abacus beads and determining the fates of men he would never meet with the stroke of a pen. Many men had fingers like that. They were a destroyer’s fingers, but not a warrior’s. Another misapprehension. Mathieu looked like a bureaucrat, unless one paid a little more attention to the marks on his skin. There, another story could be read.

  There were the calluses on his right-hand thumb and forefinger exacted by his chainsword in return for battle skill, and the notch on his left forefinger carved by the repetitive squeezing of a laspistol’s trigger. Upon the back of his right hand was a crossed scar, an older and a newer wound joined together. At the base of his left, where wrist met hand to arm, a thicker line hinted at a horrific injury long healed.

  Sicarius was well versed in judging threat. The priest was anything but weak.

  ‘Captain Sicarius, isn’t it?’ said Mathieu pleasantly. The two had been present in the same room on many occasions. Until that moment, they had yet to speak with one another. ‘Captain of the Lord Regent’s Victrix Guard?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sicarius. He examined his situation. He wanted to stay there, on his own. He did not want to share the space. He had assumed, not unreasonably, that an observation gallery would be the perfect place to be alone while the ship was in the warp, though there were other reasons for his choice. The shutters were closed. There was nothing to see. They were dangerously close to the edge. Who would want to go there? Theoretical, he thought, Mathieu seeks the same solitude as I. But how much of the same? Simply solitude, or more? He constructed a number of practicals to extricate himself from the situation. Irksomely, he did not wish to appear rude. If it were not for that, he would have simply walked away.

  So deeply ingrained was the theoretical-practical model of dialectics into his habit that he utilised it without thinking. There had been times that the mode had fallen out of fashion within the Ultramarines, but it had never completely gone away, and Guilliman’s return had seen its resurgence.

  ‘It’s terrifyingly close, isn’t it?’ said Mathieu. ‘The warp, I mean.’ The priest looked up at the plasteel shutters.

  Then he wants the same as I, thought Sicarius. More than solitude.

  ‘On the other side of that metal, outside the flimsy bubble of the Geller field, are the depths of the empyrean, where the possible is but one among many, and the impossible is true,’ said Mathieu.

  Sicarius glanced at the shutters as if he had not noticed them, although he had been staring at them unblinkingly for two hours and three minutes before he had shut his eyes.

  ‘There is only hell on the other side of that shutter,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, but there isn’t!’ said Mathieu with a nervous smile. ‘There’s so much more. You say a hell, but there is holiness there as well. Out there, the light of the Astronomican burns with a pure light that no evil thing can block. Evil flooded the galaxy, and it could not extinguish the light nor touch its source.’ He smiled again. ‘Don’t you think that’s amazing?’

  ‘You have come here to be closer to your god,’ stated Sicarius.

  ‘I have,’ said Mathieu. He closed his eyes and arched his neck, basking in the light of the Emperor as if it were flooding through the screened-off oculus.

&nbs
p; Sicarius’ lip curled. He almost walked out then. Outrage rooted him to the spot, outrage that this god-talker would come here and interrupt his meditation on the screams, and speak of glorious light where there was only horror.

  ‘How have the Space Marines managed to avoid the truth of the Imperial Cult for so long, in the face of all the evidence?’ asked Mathieu, suddenly looking at him again.

  ‘What?’ said Sicarius, wrong-footed.

  ‘There are so many miracles in the galaxy at this time. Why do you not see the Emperor’s hand? You do not see him working for us, on all our behalf. I am genuinely curious.’

  ‘We are taught to be circumspect about miracles,’ said Sicarius gruffly. ‘They are rarely what they seem.’

  ‘We have seen many in this campaign alone.’ Mathieu’s nervous smile was welcoming, the kind of smile that invited conversation and fellow feeling. Sicarius glowered at him, but the priest was not dissuaded. ‘You yourself have seen the Damned Legion fight. You have been in the presence of the blessed Saint Celestine. These phenomena are given us by the Emperor.’

  ‘I have seen what you might call miracles. You will not convince me, militant-apostolic, that what I have seen during my service are inexplicable and, therefore, divine. Hundreds of times, I have seen my brothers of the Librarius cast destruction at our enemies using the power of their minds. If I were to follow your reasoning, I would call them wizards and cower at their might, ascribing a divine origin for powers that are a part of the fact of this universe. The things they do are strange, uncanny by human measure, but there are many things in the material realm also that are bizarre. Are they all the work of gods? All works of artifice and sorcery are but the doings of sentient minds. If what you say is true, and the Emperor is a god, then so in a small way are Brother Tigurius and his ilk.’