Honour Imperialis - Braden Campbell & Aaron Dembski-Bowden & Chris Dows & Steve Lyons & Rob Sanders

by Warhammer 40K

  The 204th-floor skyway was gone. There was nothing left of it. What the necrons had begun, the Death Korps of Krieg had finished – and to judge by the broken windows, the graffitied walls and the burnt-out habs Gunthar could see across the gulf, his own people had been only too eager to abet them.

  He stared at the defaced image of the Imperial aquila, displayed over the doorway of what looked like it had been a records office. Had he passed that building on his journey to work each day? He couldn’t be sure. He retreated into the tower, found a room to sleep in. It looked like his old room, the same layout, but pretend as he might he knew better than to trust the illusion. He tried to fill a cup with cold water, but all that came out of the tap was a trickle of brown sludge. He drank this anyway.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew he hadn’t found it yet.

  He almost reached the eatery. The exclusive one, the one for which he had purchased the ring. It was on an adjacent skyway, so close, but he could see no way across to it.

  The night had drawn in, a sullen half-moon only intermittently visible through drifting clouds, so Gunthar was finding his way by luminator light. He shone his beam towards the eatery window; saw only debris stacked up behind it. The internal walls had collapsed. Even if he could have made it to the door, he couldn’t have got inside, and why would he, he thought? Those doors had always been closed to the likes of him before. He would recover few memories from in there.

  He could use the position of the eatery, however, to orient himself. He knew how many floors to drop now, how many more blocks to walk, before he came to the statue. It had been vandalised, of course, cut off at the knees, buts its feet were still plascreted to its layered plinth and Gunthar could sit on that plinth in the same spot he had sat before. He did so, tentatively, closed his eyes and tried to imagine that nothing had changed since then, that the body of the statue still rose behind him, that the offices around this public square were intact and only shuttered for the night.

  He tried to imagine Arex was beside him, that he could smell her blossom-scented perfume, see the sadness in her eyes as she looked up at that statue: one of hundreds commissioned by successive Governors to honour those they had sent off to fight, those who hadn’t returned. A graven image of Arex’s father.

  What had they done before that? He remembered. The newsreels. He had taken Arex to see them. They had made her uncomfortable, all that talk of bloodshed, but Gunthar had said it was okay because the Imperium always won. Arex had suggested they snatch protein burgers from a cart, surprising Gunthar who had been saving his credits for somewhat finer fare. He had loved that about her, the absence of any airs or graces.

  They had sat beside the statue as the city had closed around them. A perfect summer evening, until Gunthar had spoiled it, his insecurities bubbling up as they always had.

  ‘Let’s not talk about the future,’ Arex had said, tearing her gaze from the statue, looking into his eyes instead. Her voice came as clear to him now as it had been back then. ‘I don’t care about the future right now. We have this moment, and we should enjoy it and not think about my uncle or your job or any of the rest of it. The future will happen regardless, and probably not in the way any of us expect, so why worry?’

  He had opened his mouth to argue, and Arex had leaned in and touched her lips to his. Their first kiss. He had thought, at first, she was doing it to silence him. Then he had ceased to care if she was or she wasn’t, just lost himself in that blissful moment.

  He hadn’t forgotten a single detail.

  Arex broke off the contact, slipped through Gunthar’s arms, left him wreathed in a melancholic haze. On an impulse, he snatched the ring from his pocket, extended it towards her, begged her to take it before it was too late. Of course, she couldn’t answer him. She was only a ghost, and, when Gunthar opened his eyes, she was gone.

  The past was gone.

  He was weeping, without having felt the tears coming, and once that dam had burst he found he couldn’t rebuild it. He was doubled over, convulsed by wracking sobs, at the stone feet of Arex’s heroic father, howling his anguish at all he had lost to the uncaring sky and he didn’t care who or what might have heard him.

  In the chill of the early morning, he found what he had been seeking.

  He had had to venture closer than planned to the necron tomb, returning to ground level to do so. This was where the majority of his comrades had died, after all. Fortunately, there were few necrons about, the bulk of them doubtless still occupied in Thelonius, and Gunthar had only had to conceal himself twice from their patrols. Few corpses had survived the gauss guns intact, and those that had had been stripped of anything useful by the Death Korps quartermasters. However, Gunthar found a corpse the quartermasters had overlooked, and struck lucky. It was a grenadier, which meant he was likely better equipped than the average Guardsman.

  He was lying in the open. The green light from the pyramid washed over him in sickening waves, albeit diffused by daylight. Gunthar bent low, scurried over there, relieved the body of its possessions as rapidly as he could. As he wrestled with its backpack, he knocked the facemask loose. Of course, he recalled, unlike the other Krieg men, the grenadiers carried their rebreather units on their backs, allowing room for more armour at the front. He had no time to untangle the connecting hose, so he bundled the whole assembly together, taking everything, armour and all.

  He closed the fallen soldier’s eyes as a mark of respect, but didn’t stop to mourn him. He had purged the last of his human feelings in front of that statue.

  He retreated to a bolthole: a dormitory several blocks away and a few floors up, where he laid out his haul for inspection. A hellgun with two spare power packs. Six frag grenades held within pouches in the grenadier’s belt, which Gunthar now donned. The rations and the medi-pack, he didn’t need. He was likewise about to lay the rebreather to one side when he hesitated, stared into the blank eyepieces of that mask.

  He turned it around, lifted it to his face. The fabric felt scratchy against his cheeks and the mask restricted his peripheral vision. Still, there was something almost reassuring about looking at the world like this, through Krieg eyes. It made him feel one step removed from it all, looking in on life but no part of it. The only sound he could hear was that of his own breathing as he sucked in dry, filtered air through the hose. It felt good. It felt right – and, when Gunthar caught sight of his reflection in an unbroken window, it looked right too. It seemed fitting. So, instead of removing the mask, he picked up the rebreather unit, pushed his arms through its worn straps and hefted it onto his back. It was heavy, but he bore its weight gladly.

  He fastened the grenadier’s shoulder guards, chest plate, shin and knee guards to himself. The helmet was a little too large for him, but he wore this too, and pulled on the charcoal grey greatcoat for good measure. He was ready now.

  He stepped out into the street again, hellgun in hands. He had cleaned it thoroughly, familiarised himself with it, knew it was a good weapon.

  He knew he could do little alone, he wasn’t fooling himself. Gunthar had heard it said that the Emperor would raze Hieronymous Theta rather than allow his enemies to keep it. He believed this, but he also believed that if anyone or anything could survive a planetary cataclysm, the necrons could. They would flock from here to another world, begin the cycle of destruction all over again.

  He marched towards their tomb, his back straight, his head upright, no attempt at stealth made this time. Let the necrons see me, he thought, let them come. What could they do to him, after all? What more could they take from him?

  Gunthar Soreson was dead, along with everything he had valued in his meaningless life. In his place, inhabiting his flesh, was a soldier. A soldier with no orders but now possessed of a new sense of purpose, the only purpose a soldier ever really had.

  He remembered what his instructors had told him before his first b
attle: that if he could take down just one foe, he would have justified his life. He had already done more than that. He was fighting for the others now, for those comrades of his who had not been as lucky as he had been, for those who had died unfulfilled. He had no name any more, no face. He represented all of them, and he carried their souls with him.

  He was going to be a hero.

  I

  She spoke the words with a knife in her hand and a lie on her lips.

  ‘Tell me what happened, and I’ll let you live.’

  Even if he had nothing else left, he still had his voice. She hadn’t taken his tongue.

  ‘You know what happened,’ he said.

  In the knife’s reflection, he caught a glimpse of what was left of his face. The smile he couldn’t seem to shake was a mess of split lips and bloody gums.

  Her face was covered by a carnival mask. Only her eyes showed through, and they didn’t look human.

  She said, ‘Do not struggle,’ as if she expected him to actually obey.

  Do not struggle. Now there was an amusing idea.

  His shins and wrists were leashed together by pulley ropes. It looked like they came from an Imperial Guard tank. Probably his tank, he realised. Either way, there’d be no breaking free in a hurry. Even with her knife in his hands, it would take an age to saw through those ropes.

  His head sagged back into the mud and the dust. While his eyes ached too much to see clearly, the sky met his sore gaze with bruises of its own. Choked and grey – heaven promised a storm – but the moon yet showed through cracks in the caul of clouds.

  He lay in the rubble, knowing that before this place was a ruin, it was a battlefield, and before it was a battlefield, it was a public marketplace. Apparently something of a pilgrim trap, where relics and icons of dubious validity found their way from sweating hands into bandaged ones; a desperate industry based around hope, fuelled by deceit and copper coins.

  He blinked sweat from his aching eyes and wondered where his weapons were.

  ‘Tell me,’ she came even closer, and the knife turned in the moonlight, ‘what happened on the eighteenth hour of the tenth day.’

  Already the words felt like a legend. The eighteenth hour of the tenth day. She whispered it like some sacred date from antiquity, when it was only hours before.

  ‘You know what happened,’ he said again.

  ‘Tell me,’ she repeated, feverish in her curiosity, betraying her need.

  His smile cracked into something more, promoting itself to a laugh – a laugh that felt good even though it hurt like hell. The sound was made by a punctured lung, flawed by cracked ribs, and left his body through bleeding lips. But it was still a laugh.

  She used her knife as she’d been using it for over an hour now: to scrawl letters of pain across his bare chest. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered, ‘what happened.’

  He could smell his own blood, rich over the scent of scorched stone. He could see it, trickling falls of red painting his torso below the jagged cuts.

  ‘You know what happened, witch. You lost the war.’

  II

  He was in a different place when he next opened his eyes.

  His neck gave protesting twinges as he looked this way and that. The arched doorways, the broken gargoyles littering the floor, the stains of ash marking the pyre-sites of holy books...

  This was the Templum Imperialis.

  Well. One of them.

  Muffled thunder betrayed the presence of distant artillery. Whoever this witch was, she’d barely moved him from the front lines.

  He swallowed, but it was too thick and tasted of blood. Fists tightened as he tested the bonds that leashed his wrists to the chair. Nothing. No yield, no slack, and the chair itself was fastened to the floor. He was going nowhere.

  ‘Stop struggling,’ her voice came from behind. Footsteps echoed in the small chamber as she moved to stand before him. ‘There is no dignity in it.’ Her words were coloured by an ugly, halting accent. She wasn’t just from off-world – she’d barely spoken Gothic in her life.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, and punctuated the demand by spitting blood onto the tiled floor.

  She stroked her fingertip along the hideous mask covering her face. ‘I am Blood Pact.’

  The words meant nothing to him. Unfortunately, what she did next meant a great deal. With a chuckle from behind the mask, she reached for a weapon sheathed at her hip.

  ‘Your sword, yes?’

  Instinct drove him to test his bonds again. He tried not to look at the blade in her hands – seeing her touch it with her seven-fingered hands made his heart beat faster. He’d preferred it when she’d been holding the knife.

  ‘That’s better,’ she smiled. ‘It is time to speak some truths.’

  ‘You’re not going to like anything I say.’ He forced the words through a wall of tight teeth. ‘Drop the sword.’

  With her free hand, she stroked his jawline, the gesture gentle, grazing the unshaven skin without scratching it. Her fingernails had crescent-moon bloodstains beneath them, but they were old, from previous inflictions of pain.

  ‘You want this sword,’ she whispered, ‘and you want to see the colour of my blood as I lie dead upon this floor.’

  He didn’t answer. With her free hand, she lowered the black mask that covered half of her face. It was a carnival mask, perversely featured and rendered in dull iron, with a witch’s hook nose and curving chin. The face it revealed was both lovelier and uglier, all at once.

  His captor took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of recent battle and burned books.

  ‘You are one of the Argentum.’ She licked a slow circuit of her black lips, as if tasting the word. Even her smile was tainted. Her face was a canvas of meticulous scars, inflicted by a madman’s hand.

  He laughed again, though thirst made the sound ragged and raw.

  ‘What is amusing?’ she asked, closer to sneering than speaking. ‘You think we cannot recognise the difference between Imperial regiments?’

  ‘What gave it away?’ He inclined his head to his silver shoulder guard, where the Warmaster’s laurel-wreathed skull was displayed in detailed engraving, and banged his silver vambraces against the back of the chair he was tied to. The same sigil was repeated on each of them, in echo of the Warmaster’s own armour.

  Had he been able, he’d have shot her through the eye with his hellgun, which was – assuming it was still in one piece – embossed with silver aquilas on both sides of the stock.

  ‘Perhaps I dress like this because it’s cold outside,’ he said. ‘All the silver keeps me warm.’

  She smiled, as if indulging a spoiled child.

  ‘You are one of the Argentum.’ He didn’t like how she mouthed the word, like she hungered for it. ‘The Silver Kindred.’ She swallowed, and something wet clicked in her throat. ‘The Warmaster’s Own. How proud you must be.’

  He didn’t dignify that with a response.

  ‘You will tell me what I wish to know,’ she insisted with stately politeness.

  ‘Never in life.’

  Fine words, but they came out badly, slowed by blood-thickened saliva. Throne, he wished she’d put the sword down. The hurt of seeing it in her hands went beyond a matter of personal pride – beyond even regimental honour.

  ‘We know the customs of the Silver Kindred,’ she said, and her voice was rendered gentler still by the whispering hiss of profane fingertips on sacred steel. ‘To lose your weapon is to betray the Warmaster, isn’t it? It carries the harshest penalty.’

  She didn’t wait for an answer, instead drawing the blade from its scabbard. Steel sang in the air as the blade scraped free. He winced, and hated himself for it.

  ‘This pains you,’ she told him, not quite asking because the answer was so clear. ‘It hurts you to see your blade in enemy hands, doesn’t it?’


  Once more, his words were thickened by exhaustion and a bleeding mouth. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  As he spoke, she turned the sword over in her hands, seeking something. There, etched onto the grip: an Imperial eagle of white gold. She smiled at her captive, and spat on the God-Emperor’s sacred symbol. Her saliva hung down in a string, dripping from the sword onto the filthy floor.

  His eyes closed, and he imagined his hands slipping through her dark hair, fingers curling to cradle her skull while his thumbs plunged into her slitted eyes. Her screams would be music.

  ‘Look at me,’ she commanded. ‘There. That’s better.’

  She stepped closer. He had one shot at this. One shot.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he promised through the threat of tears. ‘In my Warmaster’s name, I am going to kill you, witch.’

  ‘Your Warmaster.’ She cast the sword aside without a care. It tumbled across the floor with a clash of abused metal. ‘Your Warmaster is nothing more than crow shit by now. He is as dead as your Emperor, a feast for the carrion-eaters. Now tell me what happened.’

  This again.

  ‘You know what happened,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows.’

  ‘Tell me what you saw.’ She stepped even closer, the knife in her hand again. He hadn’t seen her draw it. ‘You are one of the Argentum. You were there, so tell me what you saw.’

  One shot. Just one. She was close enough now.

  The knife’s tip kissed his jawline, stroking along, scratching patterns too soft to break the mud-marked skin. As the blade caressed his lips, she smiled again.

  ‘Tell me what happened, or you die a piece at a time.’

  ‘You don’t want to know what happened. You just want to know how he died.’

  She trembled. There was no disguising it. The knife pricked his cheek at her lapse of control, and tears drip-dropped – one from the left, one from the right – almost in unison from her fluttering eyelashes. She had to moisten her lips to speak, which she did with a black tongue.