by John French
‘Send confirmation,’ he said. The adept bowed its head with a whir of gears, and the constellations of lights on the unit began to blink. It would take over two hours for the reply to reach Terra, if it reached it at all. Distortion had been growing on the signal channels for days, squalling like a snagged storm wind. Sometimes it seemed as though there were voices, high and pained, drowning in the screech of interference, shouting from beyond the buzz of static.
No, thought Jubal. There were voices behind there, and he knew enough to know that the nightmares that wracked the astropaths were real, too. Both were echoes of the dead returning to the plane of the living, but whether they spoke warnings or lies he could not tell.
He turned slowly away from the vox-console. His body ached at the movement. It was as though every year of the life that he had lived was dragging on his bones. He would need to settle his spirit before they rode into the fire again. The storm… the storm was coming… He could hear it. He could feel it…
Changshi waited dutifully behind him, watching his khan with grey eyes that could not hide their worry. Changshi was a child of the storm. Like the rest of the token force on the Lance of Heaven, he was not of Chogoris, despite the name he bore. It, like the organs grafted into him, were a gift of his elevation from the forgotten ocean world he had been born on. There were many like him now: creations of necessity, made from and for these bitter times, warriors who had never known the joy that came from waging war for a reason other than survival. Both his nature and name had barely had time to settle into his being, and whether fate would give Changshi the time to become the warrior he could one day be, Jubal did not know.
‘So we withdraw?’ Changshi asked, frowning.
Jubal looked at him, holding the young warrior’s gaze for a long moment, and then smiling.
‘Yes. And no,’ he said, pulling a strip of parchment from his belt and handing it to Changshi.
‘Prepare signals to these of our ships, and see that these preparations are made throughout the Lance.’
The young warrior read the Chogorian script and his frown deepened.
‘Master, I do not–’
‘We have a duty to perform before we follow our orders. This spear-tip fleet is almost in the core of the system. We have tracked it, and we have bled it, but it will still strike like a bolt of thunder.’ Jubal paused for a second, weighing his decision for a final time. ‘We must take the heart of its strength before then.’
‘Master, five thousand ships… We cannot destroy that many even if we harried them for ten thousand years…’
‘I said we needed to take the heart of its strength, and that is not a ship. It is a man, a warrior like you and me. Great and terrible, and weak and vulnerable, as we all are…’ And then he told the young warrior what would happen.
At the end, Changshi bowed his head, but his face was grim.
‘What weighs on you?’ asked Jubal.
‘You said we had a duty, but how can we have a duty that drives against our orders?’
Jubal laughed and let the sound drain away slowly.
‘Which matters more, to obey the word, or to obey the spirit?’
Changshi held his gaze still.
‘When the words are the Great Khan’s and Primarch Dorn’s, is there a difference?’
‘Always,’ replied Jubal. ‘Words are the weak children of the will and the soul. To see them truly, we must look through them, and ask what spirit moved to make those words.’
He reached down to his belt, drew his knife, tossed it up in the air, caught it by the blade and threw it to Changshi. The young warrior caught it. The blade was the length of a mortal human’s forearm, curved like the moon, polished to a mirror sheen. Opals gleamed on its pommel.
‘Put it in my heart,’ Jubal said.
Changshi looked at him sharply.
Jubal grinned.
‘Or at least try to,’ he said.
Changshi was still for a second and then turned, his weight dropping, the curved blade vanishing behind his body. His eyes had gone distant, fixed on nothing, but seeing everything. Jubal waited, relaxed, his hands at his sides, smile still in place. Changshi nodded to himself as if deciding, then paused and opened his mouth to ask a question.
He snapped forwards.
Wind of truth, but the boy was fast, thought Jubal. The cover for the strike had been good too, combining timing and subtle misdirection. But he was Jubal Khan, and he had faced and bested many of the greatest weapon masters of the age. He half turned his torso, let the blade go past, brought his hand up, clamped Changshi’s knife hand and wrist, and threw him with a sharp twist. The young warrior came to his feet in a blur. Jubal tapped the flat of the knife on Changshi’s head as he rose.
‘Not quite,’ he said.
Changshi closed his eyes, and Jubal could almost hear the silent self-chastisement held behind the warrior’s teeth.
‘You know the truth of death?’ Jubal asked.
Changshi let out a breath, and smiled.
‘To embrace it like a brother, and laugh in its face.’
‘Yes,’ grinned Jubal, ‘and the truth of the knife?’
‘To be sharp.’
Jubal chuckled.
‘Yes… but no.’ He stepped away, turned, rolled his shoulders. ‘To put a knife through someone’s heart is the end. It is not the means.’ He could almost see the question forming on Changshi’s lips, could hear the inhalation of breath before the words.
Jubal spun and slashed with the knife. Changshi blocked the first blow. Fast, very fast, but Jubal had already reversed the knife, hooked the warrior’s arm with it, and yanked his guard aside. Changshi recovered, but Jubal flicked the knife between his hands, slammed a palm into the young warrior’s breastplate to rock him back, cut, switched hands again before the first cut had been blocked, then pivoted back out of range of Changshi. The young warrior made to follow, but Jubal raised a hand.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing at Changshi’s armour with the point of his knife. The young warrior looked. Long, straight cut marks scored the plate just above both of Changshi’s wrists and elbows. ‘And with the next clash, another cut…’ said Jubal, stepping close to Changshi and tapping the tip of the blade against the young warrior’s upper arm, against his fingers. ‘And with each cut, a little more strength bleeds away, a little more rage is planted in the heart, a little more blindness in the eye, until…’ He tapped the knife against Changshi’s breastplate above the heart.
‘Until the blow to the heart is not seen, and cannot be stopped,’ said Changshi. Jubal nodded, and flicked the knife over and held it out to the young warrior pommel first.
‘That is the truth of the knife, of life, of war… You kill with the last blow, but those cuts that come before allow that final blow to fall. Even Horus, master of the spear-thrust, knew that truth once. And now we will use it to kill whichever of his sons he has sent at the head of this armada.’
Changshi took the knife, looking at it, the reflection of the crescent blade caught in his grey eyes. It was a beautiful weapon, made on Chogoris and fitted with a power field generator by the Legion smiths. It had been Jubal’s father’s, given to him when he left his family and his humanity behind. Now the young warrior, who bore a Chogorian name but had never seen its skies, looked at it and realisation formed in his eyes.
‘Master, I cannot accept this…’
‘You can and you will. Just as you will go from my side and join the Blade of the Endless Horizon before the strike.’
‘But–’
‘You shall bear that knife and its truth, as this battle spirals down into the throat of the sun, and beyond.’ He paused. ‘Someone must ride beyond the horizon.’
The young warrior nodded, and Jubal began to turn away.
‘You said that Horus knows the truth of knives in war…’ began
Changshi. Jubal turned back to look at the young warrior, feeling a frown form on his face. ‘Then might we not be fighting the cuts, and not seeing the thrust to our heart?’
Jubal blinked, and then smiled.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But we fight anyway.’
Atonement
Small lives
Lords of war
Strike Frigate Persephone, Outer Solar System
The last defenders of Pluto fled towards the light of the sun. Ragged, scarred and with the blood of battle still marking their decks, they kept on. Where there had been hundreds, now there were barely enough to make a lone hundred. The Ophelia and Persephone circled their sisters and cousins, watching the fleet and the void around them. They could not see their pursuers, but they knew they were there. Aximand had suffered catastrophic losses, but new ships were still coming from the warp. There would be hunters at their backs, swift ships with cruel intent.
Some of the survivors fell even as they fled. Engines failed, wounded hulls broke apart under the stress of acceleration. The Sword Sister, which had endured battles since the first decades of the Great Crusade, became a silent hulk, ploughing on for hours on momentum. The Sign of Truth peeled away from the pack as its damaged reactors began to overload. The light of its death chased its surviving kin.
On they ran, through the gulf of night, their hulls creaking with damage, their human crews feeling their world shake, the Legion-born warriors pulling broken armour from wounded muscles; past the wrecked ships of all the invaders and usurpers who had fallen in the long millennia since humanity had first left its cradle.
In the hold of the Persephone, Sigismund paused on the threshold of the sanctuary. His armour hung from him in torn shards, grinding as he moved. Blood caked his tabard and had clotted inside the plates. He felt cold, the hot beat of the pulse in his veins quieted after the roar of battle.
‘It is what awaits us all in the end,’ said Fafnir Rann from beside him. ‘By sword or bullet, it is coming for us all.’ Sigismund looked up at the captain of the Assault Cadre. Blood and damage painted Rann’s armour too, and dried blood masked half of his face. ‘He chose how to meet it. There is nothing more any of us could ask.’ Rann paused, holding Sigismund’s gaze with his own. ‘And nothing more you can give him.’
Sigismund gave a small nod and keyed the door release.
The space beyond was small and the light low. Stone-clad walls climbed to an arched roof. The names of every warrior who had ever called the ship home and died in battle marched over every surface, incised in gilded letters. The door sealed behind Sigismund. The low rasp-thump of machinery beating a dual pulse filled the quiet.
The remains of a figure lay under a shaft of dim light. They had tried to cut him from his armour, but armour and flesh could not be separated without ending what the Sons of Horus had begun. Tubes and pipes led from blocks of machinery and jars of dark fluid. The rattling bubble of breath drawn by a machine through fluid-filled lungs rose and fell in time with the pulse and thud of the tubes.
Sigismund stepped forwards. His armour growled. Something in the mass of sticky flesh and torn ceramite flickered and opened.
‘L… o…’ the sounds bubbled out. After a second, Sigismund realised it was a word, pulled out of the figure letter by letter as the machines gave it breath. ‘L… o… r… d…’
He knelt then, servos grinding, his gaze fixed on Boreas’ eye.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am no lord here, my brother.’
‘Y…o…u…’ began Boreas. ‘You… li…ve…’
Sigismund nodded.
‘The tech-priests–’
‘I… know… I will… not… go to… the… iron sleep,’ said Boreas. Sigismund shook his head. There would be no rebirth as a Dreadnought for Boreas, no half-life of metal and war until he died a second time.
Sigismund bowed his head.
‘Why…’ The word brought his head up. Boreas’ eye was fixed on him, bright and unblinking. ‘Why… did… you want… to die?’
He saw the flash in his mind of the blades and faces of the Sons of Horus.
So many… Too many.
‘I…’ began Sigismund and now it was his words that faltered. He closed his mouth. The hiss-thump and gurgle filled the moment. ‘Atonement,’ he said at last.
‘For… what?’
‘For an oath broken,’ said Sigismund. The gaze of Boreas did not shift as he spoke, and the machines beat out the seconds. And Sigismund found himself speaking. He spoke of Euphrati Keeler, of the days after the first word of Horus’ treachery had found Dorn. He spoke of a vision she had given him of the future, and the choice that went with that vision: to be here now, as the darkness came to swallow the sun, and raise his sword against it, or to follow his primarch’s order and lead a fleet to strike at Horus in the earliest days of the war. He spoke of how he had chosen, and how he had returned with Dorn to Terra, and when the fleet that was his to command was lost, how he had told Dorn about his reason for returning and what he feared Keeler’s vision meant. And last he spoke of Dorn’s wrath at the reason.
You are not my son. The words echoed again in his mind, and he fell silent before they could come from his mouth.
‘I failed,’ he said, ‘and I swore I would never fail him again.’
‘You… were… right…’
‘That is not for us to judge.’
‘Death… is… not… atonement,’ said Boreas. ‘Not even… now… at the end…’
Sigismund felt something cold tighten within him. Boreas’ gaze had gone distant; the rhythmic beat of the pumps rose, labouring. The tubes and flasks gurgled and sputtered. The fluid in the jars was dark.
‘You… atone… by… living… until… until the last… blow… of the sword.’ Something in the ruin of meat and twisted armour shifted. It might have been a hand reaching to grasp, or just the shudder of life fleeing the will holding it. ‘Until… the last blow… of the sword… Swear it to me.’
‘You have my oath,’ said Sigismund.
The machines stopped. A high wail replaced the bubbling hiss and thump.
‘And you… mine… my brother…’ said Boreas. His eye flashed clear for a moment, his gaze steady as it held Sigismund’s. ‘Always.’
Beyond the stone walls of the room, beyond the hull of the ship lancing through the void, beyond the ships of the fleet that followed it, the Solar System turned on, silent and unceasing.
Freighter ship Antius, Trans-Saturnian Gulf
Vek paused outside the stateroom door, his hand on the release. Around him, the hum of the ship passing through the void vibrated gently through the air. The lights in all the compartments and companionways had dimmed to the night-cycle. Quiet shadows filled the edges of everything. Even on the bridge, the crew still on watch had talked little. Most had been stood down and gone to get some sleep. Vek hadn’t, though. The thoughts that had followed him from the clamour and chaos of the flight from Uranus did not quiet in this time of silence.
He had gone to check on his children, and found them sleeping. Noon had been in his bunk, mouth wide, snoring, hands tucked under his head, and he had frowned and turned over as Vek had kissed him on the forehead. Mori was not in her bunk. She had taken her blankets and curled in the corner of the room. An auto-scribe book had slipped out of her hands onto the deck. Vek had picked it up. She had sucked a breath as if to call out, raised her head and looked as though she were about to open her eyes. Vek had frozen, and Mori’s head had dropped back. After a moment her breathing had fallen back to the slow rhythm of sleep. She was frowning, he noticed, and for a blink of his mind’s eye he saw the same expression cross his memory of her mother’s face.
He had glanced at the words Mori had auto-scribed across the page of the book.
I don’t know where we are going, it read. No one is telling me. Maybe they don’t want to say. Maybe
they don’t know.
He had looked at the words for a long while and then put the auto-scribe book back beside his daughter. He bent and kissed her lightly and went to the door. In the night-dimmed corridor he rubbed the heels of his hands across his eyes. When he took them away, there were worms of neon light still clinging to his sight.
I don’t know where we are going…
He should think, try to think about what they would do when they reached Jupiter. Had the war reached there yet? Did they have enough food to make it?
He swayed.
He was tired…
His feet started to move…
He should sleep…
But he would not, could not sleep. Not now…
He walked, and the ship shivered with a familiar rhythm that once would have given him comfort. He walked and the world and past and questions turned in his head, until he found that he had stopped.
He blinked at the doors of the staterooms in front of him. He began to wonder why he was here. But, of course, he knew why…
He raised his hand, and knocked.
‘Mistress Oliton,’ he said.
The door opened from the inside before he could knock again.
The lights were on in the stateroom. Mersadie Oliton looked at him. There was an expression on her face that he could not quite read. Sadness? Resignation?
‘You have questions,’ she said, and moved back to a chair set beneath a glow lamp. The bed had not been used, he noticed. She picked up a cup from a low table and put it to her lips. Steam and the smell of caffeine rose from it. He glanced at where the decorative samostill sat on a plinth at the other end of the room. An open tin of grounds sat beside it, some gritting the polished wood. There was a pop and a gurgle, and a curl of steam rose from a brass vent-tube.
‘I think that samostill is meant to be decorative…’ he said. ‘I have certainly never used it.’
‘Ah,’ said Mersadie, ‘that would explain why it took so long to get working.’