Corax- Lord of Shadows

by Guy Haley

  A second, larger hololithic ball showed the ongoing battle against the remaining thousand cities prosecuted by Fenc. The miniature worlds had arranged themselves into an admirable defence in depth. The Sodality’s armada sallied out from this complex, ever-shifting fortress, delivering punishing blows against the Twenty-Seventh Expeditionary Fleet even as it wallowed under constant bombardment. Imperial Army forces, including the Raven Guard’s allied Therions, were taking the cities one by one, but over the weeks the toll in lives and ships was high. Some of the primarch’s officers were unhappy about his prosecution of the war. All of Fenc’s were, but Corax was resolute. Justice must come first. He watched the strategic display as a ship marker flashed and its data tag turned red, blinked and faded away.

  He turned his eyes back upon the falling station.

  Some of the station shields remained active. A misty veil of energetic particles streamed upwards around it, painting in the solar wind in vivid colour. There was a beauty to this death that Agarth did not deserve.

  ‘Time to station destruction,’ said Corax quietly. His words cut through Agarth’s angry rhetoric like a las-scalpel.

  ‘Twelve minutes, my lord,’ responded the augury watch officer. ‘The last of their thermal shields are failing.’

  A yellow flame burst upwards from the station, hardly visible against the greater fires of the sun.

  As the station began to break, so did its master. Agarth’s speech suddenly changed.

  ‘Please!’ he said, his voice distorted by the sun’s mighty electro­magnetic roar. ‘Please, I understand what I did was wrong. I should have listened. I should have given your proposal the attention it deserved. If you rescue me, I promise we shall return to negotiations. I can speak with my fellow lords of the Thousand Moons. The Sodality has seen your might, my lord. We can reach some accommodation. I can be a powerful ally to you!’ He went on in this vein for a few minutes, continuing without pause even when men began to scream in the background. The station glowed so brightly in the thermal image its shape was lost. Through the oculus it became hard to see, for the colour of the hull was changing to match that of the sun.

  ‘It is time,’ said Corax. He stood from his throne, and bade the hololith be activated. ‘Arch-Comptroller Agarth,’ he said. ‘I stand in judgement of you not as a conqueror, but as all moral men must stand in judgement of tyrants wherever they are encountered.’

  ‘Please, listen to me!’ Agarth attempted to speak back, but Corax’s voice rode the arch-comptroller’s words down, trampling them into nothing.

  ‘When we arrived here, you were among the most vocal in defence of this system’s right to govern itself. In support of your arguments, you cited the defence of the people against outside tyranny as being supreme in your duties as a leader. And yet, when faced with certain military defeat, rather than surrendering and saving the lives of those you were bound to safeguard, you destroyed their minds, turning them into unreasoning creatures simply to stall my warriors’ advance. You murdered hundreds of thousands of people to prevent your death. And yet here we are. Your end was inevitable. You are dying, arch-comptroller. As the temperature rises within your refuge, and your flesh roasts upon your bones, you shall see why this had to be done. The Emperor of Mankind sent out His crusade to save humanity from creatures like you. You, at least, will remain aware of what fate awaits you, unlike the poor souls you condemned to mindless hunger to save your own worthless life. This judgement of fire I pronounce upon you, Arch-Comptroller Agarth. I made a promise that mine would be the last face you should see. It has come to pass. So shall all oppressors die by my hand.’

  ‘Curse you! Curse you and your Emperor! I curse you forever. Why should we be slaves when we were emperors already? Why should… Why…’ Agarth made a choking sound, and began to scream.

  ‘You reveal your true colours, as all men will when faced by death,’ said Corax. ‘Goodbye, arch-comptroller.’

  For an entire minute Agarth screamed. The channel growled with stellar interference, but his screaming remained audible until, with a pathetic flare of yellow fire no more mighty than a spitting candle, the station burned up.

  ‘It is done,’ said Corax.

  His crew looked to him.

  ‘Order the Legion away from the sun. Signal Admiral Fenc and inform him the Raven Guard will join the battle. Send messages without cypher. Broadcast Agarth’s last three minutes on constant loop throughout the system. All these petty lordlings will rue the day they declined the Emperor’s generosity.’

  The sun’s blazing ocean moved as the prow of the Saviour in Shadow swept around with gathering speed, replacing orange fire with ink-black void.

  ‘Let them know I am coming.’

  Nineteen

  belthann’s gambit

  Tensat lurked in the crowd. The Raven Guard weren’t the only ones in the sub-system with infiltration skills. The compact omnispex dragging at his pocket would give him away if he were challenged, but he wouldn’t be. He hid the device’s weight with a stoop and a limp suggestive of an old industrial injury. There were many shift workers with genuine disabilities in the crowds. He looked like any other.

  That afternoon there were two traditions to be upheld, one new, one old, bringing the twelve-week cycle of Salvation to a close. At the thirteenth striking of the clock, as the Kiavahrans reckoned it, the guild representative would emerge from the marble balcony of the Old Guildhouse to give the traditional blessing of the Technocracy. This was the tradition. After a short, dry speech he would put on his best false smile and renew Kiavahr’s oaths of fealty to the Mechanicum and to the Emperor.

  The prices paid for influence, thought Tensat. For all their grumbling and their subordination to the Mechanicum, the tech-guilds were still powerful.

  Tensat had mixed feelings about the ceremony. Being of middling-rank tech-guild stock himself, it rankled to see his people reduced, but although he tried his best to hide it, Tensat was an honourable man, and the histories taught him at the scholam of the Lycaean prison moon had curdled his blood. The tech-guilds deserved what they got. Personally he felt he did not deserve to suffer for his ancestors’ wrongs, but that was what the Lycaeans had endured before the coming of the primarch. Justice delivered, of a kind. Life could not be perfect. Solutions invariably begat fresh problems. Good men were never as good as they maintained. Life went on, and he was determined to preserve the peace. Nevertheless, he was in his most private thoughts sceptical of the Great Crusade. Pantomimes like this did not help.

  ‘Concentrate.’ The procurator mechanical’s machine grating emanated from a vox-bead buried deep in his ear.

  ‘I am,’ he subvocalised. ‘This is me concentrating.’

  ‘Your brainwaves suggest otherwise.’

  ‘There are people who would call me a traitor for speaking with you,’ Tensat said.

  ‘There are other people who would call you a traitor for defying these assassins,’ said the procurator mechanical. ‘We all must pick our sides.’

  ‘We’re all on the same side, aren’t we?’

  ‘Concentrate!’ repeated the procurator mechanical snappishly.

  Tensat grinned.

  The promise of rain was no deterrence to the large crowd gathered in the square ready for the ceremony. A heavy security presence of enforcers and the Mechanicum’s army allayed fears of a repeat of the Salvation Day bombing.

  The trick for Tensat had been to make the security look lax enough to be tempting to the terrorists, without revealing it to be deliberately lax. It was a difficult balance that kept Tensat awake for a week, and his nerves were still frayed. He held his gaze forward. Trying not to look at all the possible sniper’s nests he’d identified around the Old Guildhouse was a trial.

  The guildhouse clock ticked its way towards the thirteenth hour. Mechanical figures capered out of plasteel doors either side of the face. They were m
arvellous devices forged in a greater era, but they reminded Tensat of the terrifying folk tales his father had told him of the days of the Dark Ages, when mankind’s slaves turned upon them.

  Looking back on it, Tensat thought his old man had enjoyed frightening him.

  A fanfare announced the guild representative. He came out onto the balcony at a speed he probably thought of as regal, but which Tensat thought made him look doddering. He bestowed a wave and a smile upon the crowd. There were a few half-hearted cheers. Most of the people there couldn’t care less about the speech and were waiting for the traditional handouts that came at the close of the ceremony. Tensat couldn’t blame them.

  ‘Don’t come any further out,’ Tensat muttered under his breath. The representative was too close to the edge of the balcony, leaning out to wave at more of his supposedly adoring public. He was supposed to stay near the back.

  ‘Why are you agitated?’ asked the procurator.

  ‘He’s making it easy for them,’ subvocalised Tensat. ‘My ideal conclusion to today is an alive representative and a dead rebel.’

  ‘My dear fellow citizens,’ began the representative, ‘it is thirty-two Terran years since the Emperor came here, and the great saviour, Corvus Corax, brought freedom to all of our people from the old order!’

  A ragged cheer went up. The proletariat were poorly educated, but some of them were aware of how little things had changed, and dared to stare bleakly at their better who, despite the primarch’s ideals, remained in power. Rain began to fall.

  ‘The populace of Kiavahr and of Deliverance stand united as part of the greater Imperium of Man. It is my privilege to appear here today as your guild representative to commemorate this momentous occasion in our history. The injustices of the past are over. Together we look forward to a glorious, shared future within the Imperium, and in partnership with our friends of the Mechanicum of Mars. The centuries have given mankind many tragedies to overcome–’

  Later, Tensat reflected that the assassin had a sick sense of humour, timing her gunshot then. A single crack troubled the air. The guild representative was enveloped in the flare of light from a refractor field. It did him little good. He fell dead with a neat hole drilled through his forehead. Armed guild troops sprang from their hiding places and began to blaze away at whatever caught their eye. Innocent people died.

  The crowd scattered.

  Tensat employed a few choice curse words. ‘This is Tensat. Stop firing into the crowd!’ he voxed openly. He abandoned his disguise, setting his shoulder against the flow of people. He held his ground as fleeing workers slammed into him, wincing at every one of tomorrow’s bruises.

  ‘They used a shield piercer! Where did they get that? Who the hell are these people?’ shouted Tensat. He pulled out his omnispex. The readings pointed him to a building half a kilometre away. He stared around it wildly, seeking the location of the shooter.

  ‘I have the assassin’s location, if it is of use,’ said the procurator.

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Tensat. He turned and joined the flow of people running towards enforcer transports skidding into the square.

  ‘She is fleeing west along Recatalysation Way in a groundcar,’ said the procurator.

  Tensat pulled out his badge and ran at a junior-level enforcer skimming down to ground level on a grav-bike.

  ‘I’m going to need this,’ he said, half pulling the man from his seat. Armoured enforcers were pouring out of the vehicles. For fear of alerting the assassin, Tensat had told them nothing about the true nature of the operation, and they were charging about ineffectually, arresting people at random, bursting into buildings and charging upstairs, unaware that the killer was long gone. He had to act now. In a few moments Mechanicum forces would arrive to add their firepower and misunderstanding to that of the guild troops and the enforcers, with all the arguing over jurisdiction and responsibility that would entail.

  Tensat gunned the engine, setting the grav motor to maximum repulsion and pushed up into the sky, the sudden acceleration squashing him into the padded saddle.

  ‘Give me a direct trace on her, procurator,’ shouted Tensat over the blast of wind.

  The pict screen embedded in the bike fairing blinked on, and the procurator mechanical used some technological witchery to display a cartograph for Tensat. A pulsing red dot was dashing along the lines of streets, jinking dangerously between slower-moving traffic. Tensat banked the bike around. The powerful repeller accelerated him to several hundred kilometres an hour. He dived down between the metal canyons of Kiavhar’s surface, polluted rain stinging his eyes as he searched out the assassin’s car.

  He nearly overshot as the car slewed wildly into a side street. He had a brief flash of a figure tumbling from the driver’s compartment and sprinting away. The rain was coming down hard now, soaking Tensat’s disguise in metal-scented water. His skin tingled and his eyes stung at the touch of the toxic downpour. He should seek shelter.

  He threw the grav-bike into reverse, clinging on to avoid being hurled over the control column. It rebelled at the sudden deceleration, forcing him to wrestle hard to bring it round. The stabiliser fins raked on the facade of a tenement block, and the machine rolled to the left, but by then he was slowing. He circled down, punched the landing gear button and set the craft down next to the groundcar.

  Greasy raindrops slapped into his hair. The few people on the street were hurrying into building overhangs to escape the rain. Chemical reek burned his throat as he ran.

  ‘Do you still have her?’ he voxed.

  ‘A door into a silo cellar, two hundred metres from your position.’

  Tensat ran. Puddles grew quickly in the rain. The rockcrete was slippery underfoot. He drew his gun, the sight of it making people sheltering along the edges of the alleyway shrink back.

  The assassin had left the door open. He slowed, his gun in a two-handed grip. He moved quickly on the door and went through, gun up to cover both sides, sweeping left to right, knowing full well that if the killer was waiting on the wrong side, his decision not to go right to left would lead to his death.

  Nothing. A sloping corridor plunged down steeply beneath the silo. Tubby chemical reservoirs loomed overhead, closely ranked and imposing.

  ‘Where is Belthann?’

  ‘He is coming,’ said the procurator mechanical.

  Tensat ducked back out and searched the sky. Dirty clouds rubbed against one another. ‘I don’t see anything.’

  ‘He told me he would be with you soon.’

  ‘He’s bloody late! We should never have listened to him. This was a bad idea,’ said Tensat. He paused. Rain drummed off his coat. ‘I’m going after her.’

  ‘I advise you to wait,’ said the procurator.

  ‘If you were here instead of me, then you would get to make that decision. But you aren’t.’ Tensat ran into the tunnel, gun ahead of him, heart thumping.

  The tunnel went downward quickly, turning back on itself in a series of descending switchbacks that Tensat approached with adrenalised caution. The lights flickered there. Power was inconstant. He was going into the undercity, a place enforcers avoided outside of purgation sweeps. Alone, he was in danger.

  ‘Enforcer Tensat,’ the procurator mechanical’s voice buzzed in his ears. ‘I’m losing your trace. You are engaging in perilous decision making. Stop, and wait for backup. Belthann is on his way. Let him apprehend the suspect.’

  ‘Not now!’ gasped Tensat. The procurator’s voice broke up as he headed deeper into the undercity.

  He rounded another corner. A woman was there, suddenly facing him. She was a bit younger than him, with poorly chopped hair and a face of a type he found attractive. They stared at each other in shock a moment, until she loosed a shot at him. He ducked. She missed, and ran off.

  Tensat followed. The corridor bottomed out there into a large, low-roofed space full of
support pistons for the city above. It was a good place for an ambush. The assassin dodged between the supports. He shot three times, his las-bolts picking molten holes in the metal. She reached the wall and skidded off to the right to barge through a sheet plasteel door, sending it booming into the dusty rockcrete walls. Tensat snapped off another shot. The las-pulse lit up the dark with a flicker-blink ruby glare that imprinted itself on his retinas. Dazzled, he nearly missed the opening, but stumbled through onto the head of a short flight of stairs. A return slug shot zinged up the stairway, breaking powder from the wall. If the woman had stopped then, she might have dropped him with a second round before he recovered, but to Tensat’s good fortune she took to her heels again, the slap of her boots receding down the corridor at the foot of the flight, then skipping down another set of stairs.

  Tensat advanced quickly but did not run. He kept his gun up. They were on the very fringes of the undercity. No power ran in that part. Dying biolume panels lit the corridor, the bacteria in them starving to death for want of nutrient replacement. Several were blotchy glows that illuminated only themselves. The rest gave off a green, fungal light more fitted to primeval forest floors. The passage at the foot of the stairs was short. The second stairway longer than the first. Tensat stepped downwards. His feet crunched in grit fallen from the rotting walls. Black slime grew down the centre of water stains streaking the grey rockcrete. It was getting hotter. He walked as quietly as he could, fearing that the thunder of his heart and his snatched breaths would give him away. He could no longer hear the sound of running. Either the woman had outpaced him or she was waiting for him.

  The last step. He came off it softly, gun ready. The way ahead was straight and even more dimly lit than the passageway above.

  The wall had given out and rubble slumped into the corridor, a long time ago by the look of it. Tensat flattened himself against the wall and slid along to the pile of rockcrete chunks.

  It will be now, he thought.