Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘He fought for me, that’s all I know,’ said Rawne. ‘For me and for Varl. Out of honour. Like a daemon.’

  ‘So I understand,’ said Gaunt.

  ‘No, literally like a daemon.’

  Rawne lay back.

  ‘I hear it got interesting,’ he said. ‘Hark was filling me in. Close to the wire here, and with Pasha’s mob too.’

  ‘As close as it got with you,’ said Gaunt.

  ‘Hark says the battlefleet annihilated some island. Took out Sek’s flagship. Is the fether dead now?’

  ‘That’s the presumption,’ Gaunt replied. ‘His gambits failed. Except with Mabbon. The Sekkite host collapsed almost overnight. Those that survive are fleeing the system. Urdesh is won. This is a victory.’

  ‘So that’s what it feels like,’ said Rawne.

  He looked at Gaunt.

  ‘Is it true what I heard? Kolea?’

  Gaunt nodded.

  ‘And the lad Dalin, and–’

  ‘We lost a lot. It’s hard to take in.’

  ‘It always is,’ said Rawne.

  Beltayn appeared at the doorway.

  ‘My lord,’ he said.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Gaunt, getting up, ‘I’m late.’

  ‘No, sir, you need to read this.’ Beltayn held out a signal sheet. ‘It was just received. I brought it to you at once.’

  Gaunt took the sheet and read it. Then he held it up so Rawne could read it too.

  ‘Well,’ said Rawne. ‘There’s your confirmation. An unequivocal victory. What does this part mean, the bottom here? ‘Execution undertaken by unidentified Astra Militarum personnel’?’

  A Munitorum aide directed him to the new Tanith billet as soon as he stepped off the landing field.

  It was a fine set of chambers, just off the palace’s Circular Court. Sunlight at the windows, rows of clean cots, a scrubbed floor.

  The place was empty. He walked in, in his clean but borrowed clothes, down the length of the first chamber, between the lines of cots, each one laundered and made-up with precision.

  A man, the only person around, sat on a cot at the end of the long line, buttoning the jacket of his dress blacks. He looked up.

  He barely reacted. Just a flicker of surprise. Mach Bonin rose to his feet, smoothing out the front of his dress uniform.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, as if Mkoll had only stepped outside for a smoke. ‘There’s a parade about to start. I’m late as it is.’

  He reached down and slid an old kitbag out from under his cot. He dumped it on the next cot along.

  ‘I was holding this for you,’ Bonin said, matter-of-factly. ‘That cot’s free, so you can have that.’

  Mkoll nodded. ‘We’ll need another bed,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’ asked Bonin.

  Mkoll pointed down the hall. Brin Milo was standing in the doorway. He looked reluctant to step inside.

  ‘Where did you find him?’ Bonin asked.

  ‘Long story,’ said Mkoll.

  A strong wind was blowing in across the High Parade behind the palace. A hard sun burned high in the sky. The pale skies of Eltath were clear of smoke for the first time in months.

  Years, probably.

  Ibram Gaunt, Lord Executor, walked out onto the field, his camo cloak billowing behind him. Drill officers barked, and the assembled companies snapped to attention. Brigades of Jovani, Helixid, Narmenian, Vitrian, Keyzon and a host of gleaming Urdeshi regiments. To one side, the small formation of Tanith, in perfect order. A row of field guns stood ready to fire the salute.

  Gaunt stepped up onto the podium. An Imperial flag had been draped over the lectern. Overhead, huge standard banners swayed and cracked in the wind.

  He nodded to the honour guard as he walked past them, and to the seniors of high command in attendance: Urienz, Blackwood, Cybon, Tzara and Grizmund, each one of them regal in their ceremonial uniforms.

  Gaunt stepped to the lectern. He took out a sheaf of papers. He looked out at the assembled regiments, then down at his notes. He paused, and gestured to Ludd, who was leading the honour guard. Ludd hurried forwards.

  ‘My lord?’ Ludd whispered.

  ‘Take these, Ludd,’ Gaunt said. ‘I won’t need them.’

  Ludd took the sheaf of papers, careful not to let any of them blow away in the wind.

  ‘Isn’t this your speech, sir?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘It’s someone’s speech,’ said Gaunt. ‘Not mine.’

  Ludd stepped back into line, stuffing the papers into his coat pocket. The lords militant and high officers looked at each other, baffled.

  ‘Astra Militarum,’ said Gaunt, speaking into the vox mic. His words boomed out across the field. ‘Guardsmen. Lasmen. I have been asked to address you today. To deliver thanks for the struggles we have all endured together on Urdesh Forge World, and to celebrate our accomplishments here. Death is a part of those struggles, and that makes it hard to celebrate, even in a time of triumph. I wrote a speech. It was shit, so let’s draw a veil over that.’

  A murmur rippled across the field.

  ‘It was just words,’ Gaunt went on. ‘They rang false to me, so I know for sure they’ll ring false to you too. I’ve heard enough generals speak in my time. It usually means nothing except that they like the sound of their own voices. You all know what you’ve done.’

  He paused. He reached into his pocket and took out the signal paper Beltayn had handed to him. He began to unfold it.

  ‘A few minutes ago,’ Gaunt said into the vox, ‘I was passed a signal. Information that has just been received. I want to share the contents of that signal with you, because it will mean more to you than any glowing words I can muster.’

  He cleared his throat, reading off the thin paper, which fluttered and flapped in his gloved hands.

  ‘Just before noon today, the Astra Militarum Intelligence Service confirmed a report received yesterday from an Aeronautica Imperialis patrol in the Southern Oceanic Zone. The report, which has been verified, declares that seven days ago, on an island called Orchidel, in the Faroppan archipelago, the Archenemy Anarch, known as Sek, was apprehended and terminated by Astra Militarum troops.’

  He looked up. The wind blew across the field. The banners whipped and cracked.

  ‘I repeat,’ he said, ‘the identity is verified and the termination is confirmed. The Anarch is dead. Today, we have achieved a victory that has not been paralleled since Balhaut. Perhaps, the victory of this crusade. I feel that’s the only thing you need to hear from me today.’

  He stepped back from the lectern. Despite the wind, he could hear that the applause and cheering had already begun to spread through the lines.

  He turned, and beckoned Trooper Perday forward from the honour squad. She looked so nervous and afraid he thought she might faint. In her arms, she clutched the battered old set of Tanith pipes he’d given her three days before, and which she’d been practising on ever since, enough to master the basic skills. The boy was never coming back, but Gaunt felt that the original Tanith traditions ought to be respected.

  ‘Trooper Perday?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ Ree Perday replied, swallowing hard.

  ‘Now you can play something,’ he said.

  About the Author

  Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor and Eisenhorn books, the most recent of which is The Magos. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous audio dramas and short stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer universes. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

/>   An extract from Dark Imperium: Plague War.

  Weak light bobbed through pitchy black, casting a pale round that grew and shrank upon polished blue marble quarried on a world long ago laid waste. The hum of a grav motor sawed at the quiet of the abandoned hall, though not loudly enough to banish the peace of ages that lay upon it. The lamp was dim as candlelight, and greatly obscured by the iron lantern framing it. The angles of the servo-skull that bore the lantern further cut the glow, but even in the feeble luminance the stone gleamed with flecks of gold. The floor awoke for brief moments at its caress, glinting with a nebula’s richness, before the servo-skull moved on and the paving’s glory was lost to the dark again.

  The lonely figure of a man walked at the edge of the light, sometimes embraced by it completely, more often reduced to a collection of shadows and mellow highlights at its edge. The hood of his rough homespun robe was pulled over his head. Sandals woven of cord chased the light at a steady pace. The circle of light was small, but the echo of the man’s footsteps revealed the space it traversed as vast. Less could be discerned about the man, were there anyone there to see him. He was a priest. Little else could be said besides that. It would certainly not be obvious to a casual observer he was militant-apostolic to the Lord Commander. He did not dress as men of his office ordinarily would, in brocade and jewels. He did not seem exalted. He certainly did not feel so. To himself, and to those poor souls he offered the succour of the Emperor’s blessing, he was simply Mathieu.

  Mathieu was a man of faith, and to him the Space Marines seemed faithless, ignorant of the true majesty of the Emperor’s divinity, but the Mortuis Ad Monumentum had the air of sanctity nevertheless.

  Mathieu liked it for that reason.

  Beyond the slap of the priest’s shoes and the whine of the skull, the silence in the Mortuis Ad Monumentum was so total, the sense of isolation so complete, that not even the background thrum of the giant engines pushing the Macragge’s Honour through the warp intruded. The rest of the ship vibrated, sometimes violently, sometimes softly, the growl of the systems always there. Not where the priest walked. The stillness of the ancient hall would not allow it. Within its confines time itself held its breath.

  Mathieu had spent his quieter days exploring the hall. Its most singular features were the statues thronging the margins. They were not just in ones or twos, effigies given space to be walked around and admired, nor were they ensconced in alcoves to decorate or commemorate. No, there were crowds of stone men, in places forty deep, all Adeptus Astar­tes in ancient marks of armour. It may be that they were placed with care once, but no longer, and further into the hall, the more jumbled their arrangements became. The hall had been breached in days gone by, and the statues destroyed. Untidy heaps of limbs were bulldozed carelessly aside and ugly patching marked wounds from ancient times.

  The warriors remembered by the statues had died ten thousand years before Mathieu’s birth. Perhaps they had even fallen in the Emperor’s wars to create the Imperium itself. Such an incredible length of years, hard to comprehend, and yet now the being who had led these self-same dead men commanded the ship again.

  It dizzied Mathieu that he served a son of the Emperor. He could not quite believe it, even after all that had happened, all that he had seen.

  Mathieu stopped in the dark where a group of statues huddled together. White stone glowed grey in the gloom. He had the terrifying notion that they had come alive and gathered to block his path, a phalanx of ghosts angered by profanity. He put aside the thought. He ignored the cold hand of fear creeping up his back. He had come off course, nothing more. It was easy enough to get lost in a hall half a mile wide and almost as long.

  His servo-skull bore a large HV upon its forehead. By the letter V alone he called it. He could not bring himself to refer to it by her name.

  ‘V,’ he said. His voice was pure and strong. It cut the shadows and frightened back the dark. Mathieu was an unimposing man, young, slight, but his voice was remarkable; a weapon greater than the worn laspistol he carried on his left hip, or the chainsword he bore into battle. Loud and commanding before his congregations, it seemed tiny in the face of the dead past, but like a silver bell chiming deep in winter-stilled woods, it was clear and bright and lovely.

  V emitted a flat, static-laced melody of acknowledgement.

  ‘Ascend five feet. Elevate lamp, pan left to right.’

  The skull’s motors pulsed. It rose up into the high voids of the monu­mentum. The light abandoned Mathieu, angling instead for the still figures surrounding him. Stone faces leapt from the dark, as if snatching the chance to be remembered, quickly drowning again in the black as V turned away. For a moment Mathieu’s fear came back. He did not recognise where he was, until V’s pale lamplight washed over a Space Marine captain of some unremembered era, the right arm held so proudly aloft broken off at the elbow. This warrior he recognised.

  Mathieu breathed in relief. ‘Descend to original height. Rotate lantern downwards to light my way. Proceed.’

  V voiced its fractured compliance. There were pretensions to musicality in the signal, but the limited vox-unit was fifth hand at least, scavenged like all V’s other fittings, and overuse had blunted its harmonies.

  ‘Proceed to the hermitage, quickly now. My time for this duty is running out.’

  V banked around and swept onwards. Mathieu picked up his pace to keep up.

  The Adeptus Astartes pretended to disdain worship. It was well known among the Adeptus Ministorum that they did not regard the Emperor as a god. Mathieu had known this all through his calling. The truth had proved to be not so simple. On the ship there were many shrines, decorated lovingly with images of death, and containing the bones of heroes in reliquaries that rivalled those of the most lauded saint in their ostentation. The Ultramarines’ cult was strong, though they did not worship. In chapels that denied religion their skull-masked priests protested loudly about the human nature of the Emperor and the primarchs while venerating them as gods in all but name. Their practice of honour, duty and obedience was conducted with a fanatical devotion.

  There was an element of wilful blindness to their practices, thought Mathieu.

  The way the Adeptus Astartes reacted to Roboute Guilliman bordered on awe. From the beginning Guilliman had warned Mathieu himself not to be worshipful, that he was not the son of a god. The priest had witnessed how irritated the primarch became with those who did not heed his words. And yet, these godless sons of his looked upon him, and they could barely hide their fervour.

  Mathieu did as he had been told. He affected to see the man Guilliman wished to be, but his familiarity with the primarch was largely an act. Mathieu did revere the primarch, sincerely and deeply.

  Previous militant-apostolics had carved themselves out a little realm in Guilliman’s palace spire atop the giant battleship. The position came with appropriately luxurious quarters. Some time before Mathieu’s tenure the largest room had been converted into a chapel of the Imperial Cult. It was gaudy, too concerned with expressions of wealth and influence and not faith. Mathieu had done his best to make it more austere. He removed some of the more vulgar fixtures, replaced statues of ancient cardinals with those of his favourite saints. There had been a sculpture of the Emperor in Glory standing proudly, sword in hand, upon the altar. Mathieu had replaced that with an effigy of the Emperor in Service; a grimacing corpse bound to the Golden Throne. Mathieu had always preferred that representation for it honoured the great sacrifice the Emperor made for His species. The Emperor’s service to mankind was so much more important than His aspects as a warrior, ruler, scientist or seer. Mathieu always tried to follow the example of the Emperor in Service, giving up what little comfort he had to aid the suffering mass of humanity.

  The chapel was tainted by the dishonesties of holy men. He preferred to lead worship with the ship’s bonded crew in their oily churches. He maintained the private chapel onl
y because the display was expected of him. He rarely prayed there.

  For his private devotions he came down to this deserted cult monument of irreligious men.

  At the back of the hall was a small charnel house, where the stacked skulls of fallen heroes were cemented in grim patterns. The dust lay thick on all its decoration when Mathieu had discovered it. Nobody had been there for a long time.

  Beneath the eyeless stares of transhuman skulls, he had set up a plain wooden altar, this also bearing an effigy of the Emperor in Service. Arrayed around it were lesser statues of the nine loyal primarchs, as could be found in any holy place. That representing Roboute Guilliman was three times the size of the others. Mathieu genuflected to both Emperor and His Avenging Son, though the real Guilliman might well shoot him for doing so.

  He knelt awhile and prayed to the statues, the Emperor first, His sons and then finally to Guilliman. He stood and took from a large ammunition box thirty-six candles which he added to the racks of hundreds around the periphery of the room. When the candles were in place upon their spikes, he ignited a small promethium flame, and from it lit the wicks one by one, whispering solemnly over each.

  ‘Emperor watch over you,’ he said. ‘Emperor watch over you.’

  Each candle represented the wish for a prayer from a menial somewhere, those ordinary folk who made up the majority of the Imperial citizenry yet otherwise had no voice. When someone asked him for the blessing of light, Mathieu never refused, no matter how high or low, but promised to burn a candle for every request. There were so many pleas, so many in pain, even within the small world of a starship, that he could not possibly hope to keep his vow. In the end he had taken on aid, as his deacons insisted he should. Having always denied himself servants or servitors he was troubled by how easily he had got used to them. He never wanted to become like other high churchmen, with bloated households thousands strong, and feared this was but the first step on that road.