The Crimson Fist

by John French

  Dorn was staring up at one of the hidden statues as Sigismund approached.

  ‘Yes, my son?’ said Dorn, without turning.

  Sigismund looked up at the covered stone. There were still recognisable features under the wind-rippled fabric: the hint of a predatory stance, the projecting shape of a clawed hand pressed against the covering as if about to rip through. Curze, he realised, the brother who had tried to kill Dorn. Was that a sign of what was to come? Should we have seen these darker days in that moment of near murder?

  ‘They should be torn down,’ said Sigismund. ‘All of the traitors. They should not stand beside those who keep their oaths.’

  Dorn gave a low chuckle and turned to look at Sigismund. ‘Would you like to do it yourself?’

  ‘Give me the word, lord, and I will do it with my own hands.’

  Dorn gave a brief smile and shook his head.

  ‘Not yet. We are not at such a point yet.’

  ‘Are we not?’ asked Sigismund, his face still, eyes unblinking. Dorn did not answer but looked back up at the statue of Curze that stood covered behind Sigismund.

  ‘No,’ growled Dorn. ‘The Imperium endures and will outlast this treachery.’ Sigismund thought that Dorn looked as if he were speaking to Curze’s statue as much as him. ‘There is still honour, there is still loyalty.’ Dorn dropped his gaze, frowning. ‘I do not know how this war will unfold, my son. I do not know what it will demand of us, but I know that eventually it will end, and for that day we must be ready.’

  Sigismund echoed Dorn’s frown. ‘Horus has the initiative, we are the ones mired in confusion. He could cut us apart piece by piece, wait until we are so weak that there is no resistance left.’

  Dorn looked sharply at Sigismund, but he could tell that his father had considered the same possibility.

  ‘If it was Curze or Alpharius then perhaps, but they are not at the heart of this.’ Dorn looked to where the moon was rising at the darkening edges of the sky. It was red, stained by the dust and smoke rising from the palace as it settled into night. ‘He will come here,’ said Dorn softly. ‘He will not stay out amongst the stars and bleed us to nothing. No, he is still Horus. The single spear thrust to the throat, the final killing blow. He will come here to finish this. One night we shall look up and see the heavens burning.’

  He sees it already, thought Sigismund. At least in part. He shall see that I was right, that my choice was right.

  ‘Father.’ Dorn looked at him. Sigismund could feel the primarch’s eyes playing over his face, assessing, judging.

  ‘Something troubles you?’

  ‘I must speak with you about why I requested to return here, about why I did not take command of the Retribution Fleet.’

  ‘We have talked of this before. I saw no reason to question your judgement then and I see none now.’

  Sigismund swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.

  ‘I had another reason.’ Sigismund felt the words hang in the air. I am committed now, he thought. There is no turning back.

  ‘Speak,’ said Rogal Dorn. The primarch had become still, his gaze fixed, as if his entire being focused on Sigismund. A dust-scented wind stirred his white-edged cloak, lifting it against the growing gloom.

  Sigismund looked away, his mind weighing how to begin.

  ‘It was on the Phalanx,’ he said, after a moment. ‘The fleet was being broken up, preparing to follow back to Terra or strike towards Isstvan.’ He thought back to that narrow sliver of time, remembered the tension that ran through every Imperial Fists ship after Garro’s revelation. Some thought it could not be true but those who had seen the evidence had no such comfort. While the truth soaked in, the Imperial Fists had made ready for war. ‘I was walking the lower habitation decks. I am not sure why, I do not think that I had a reason besides perhaps seeking peace.’

  ‘You lacked clarity?’ said Dorn, his blank voice as unreadable as his face. Sigismund shook his head.

  ‘I knew what you required of me.’ He glanced away to where the shadows of night gathered at the margins of the amphitheatre. ‘Perhaps I was looking for purpose.’

  ‘Purpose?’ said Dorn. ‘You knew what was required but you sought purpose?’ Sigismund nodded, and let out a long breath.

  ‘I knew my orders, but I was missing something.’ Sigismund blinked, paused. He remembered those days on the Phalanx more clearly than he had lived them. He had felt diminished, as if Garro’s words had taken something vital from him. ‘For so long I took each step of the crusade without doubt. Each campaign, each battle, each blow had purity. That was my strength, had always been my strength.’

  Dorn lowered his chin and his eyes seemed to darken. ‘Your thoughts seem far from clear, captain.’

  ‘Perhaps, lord,’ nodded Sigismund.

  ‘So you refused the command because of this? Because your purity of purpose was disturbed?’ There was anger in Dorn’s voice, controlled, held back but still there.

  ‘No, lord. I would have done your will without question.’

  ‘But you did not.’ Sigismund felt ice in the words, the judgement forming in them. I must tell it all, he thought, but did not meet his father’s eye as he continued.

  ‘I was on the deck where Garro’s civilians were quartered. It was deserted and I thought I was alone.’ It had been quiet, he remembered. The whole fleet had bustled with preparation and tension but at that moment the decks he walked had been silent. Afterwards it had struck him as strange, as if he had walked along a corridor of stillness between moments of activity. ‘It was only when she spoke to me that I realised I was not alone. “First captain,” she said. I drew my sword and turned.’ Sigismund frowned at where his hand rested on the pommel of his sheathed sword. ‘She stood only five paces behind me. I had not even heard her approach.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Dorn. Sigismund looked up, his eyes unfocused.

  ‘The remembrancer,’ he said, the memory suddenly more vivid than the present: a human girl in a pale robe. ‘Keeler,’ said Sigismund. ‘The one that spoke to you before we–’

  ‘I remember her,’ Dorn snapped. Superstition clustered around Euphrati Keeler. Sigismund knew that some form of cult had sprung up around the girl. It was dangerous, a breach of the Imperial truth. Some said she was a witch, others a saint. She had an undeniable confidence and poise, but then so had history’s many false prophets. Sigismund knew this to be true, but somehow that truth seemed dimmer as he remembered Keeler standing in the memory of a stone-lined corridor.

  ‘She was just there, looking at me as if she had been waiting, as if she knew I would come.’ She had smiled, he remembered. A smile of understanding in a fragile face too young to show such calm. She had nodded as if answering a question he had not asked. You have questions, she had said.

  ‘What did she say?’ said Dorn, and the memory dissolved back into the reality of the Investiary and his father’s voice.

  ‘Enough that I came to you and asked to return here, my lord,’ said Sigismund.

  ‘And what could ever have been enough for that?’

  The question echoed in Sigismund’s ears. The moment extended, filling him with vivid sensations: the perfect texture of the ouslite plinth ten paces behind his father’s back, the rustle of fabric shifting in the breeze around the statues. He could detect a dozen spices in the wind, traces of smoke, dust and coming rain. He suddenly realised it was the smell of a half-forgotten life, of a brief childhood lived in the drift camps on the Ionus Plateau. It was the smell of a lost home. He had not thought of that half-remembered scrap of time for decades. He wondered why it had returned to him now.

  He looked into Rogal Dorn’s eyes.

  ‘It was not just what she told me. It was what she made me see.’ Sigismund paused, remembering Keeler’s face. You must decide, she had said, and there had been sorrow in her voice. ‘The war will come to Terra,’ sa
id Sigismund.

  ‘A possibility that you did not need a remembrancer to reveal to you,’ said Dorn as he raised a hand to point at Sigismund’s chest. The threat in the gesture was like the muzzle of a gun pointing at his heart. ‘Was it not you that said Horus could try and defeat us without coming here? Now you say back to me a judgement that I have reached myself and call it revelation.’

  ‘I hoped that you might disagree, my lord. That there might be another possibility.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘There is not. I cannot doubt your judgement that Horus will bring the war to Terra. It does not refute my choice, it validates it.’ Dorn looked away, his face suddenly half-hidden in the gathering night. ‘It is not the fact that the traitors will come here, it is how,’ said Sigismund, and remembered.

  ‘You must choose,’ she had said. He had been about to tell her to return to her quarters, to keep her falsehoods to herself. ‘You must choose your future and the future of your Legion, Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists.’ Her words had held him in place. Fear filled him, forgotten and alien in its raw intensity. ‘You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father’s side at the end.’

  ‘The end of what?’ he had managed to say.

  ‘The end of everything that has been,’ she had said.

  Sigismund kept his eyes fixed on his father, trying to read the effect of his words as he spoke. ‘She spoke and I seemed to see what she spoke of.’ Her words had unfolded in his mind in blurred reality, like snatches of dreams, like flowering nightmares. ‘I could see it. It was real.’

  So many ships that the sky was iron. Fire falling like monsoon rain. Armoured bodies heaped as high as the Titans that strode amongst them. Hundreds of thousands of enemies, millions, an uncountable horde surging through the broken walls. An angel, its wings red in the pyre light of a burning palace.

  ‘They will come here, their numbers will blot out the sun and cover the ground, and we will be few, father.’

  ‘Few or many, let them come,’ growled Dorn.

  ‘We will be few and they, they will be far more than we can defeat. That is the point when we will face the end.’

  Imperial Fists tumbling from blackened walls, falling like water, broken, bloody. Columns of smoke so tall that they touch the armoured sky. And still they come. Ships blasting dead wrecks aside to scatter more troops to the surface.

  ‘You must understand what it will come to,’ she had said. As she spoke he had known it was true. The universe was war without end. The Imperium had turned on itself and so it was only a matter of time before everything rested on a single battle, on a sword’s edge.

  ‘It will come to that, father,’ he said quietly. ‘It will come to the last breath in the body of the Imperium. I saw it, and understood that it was true, and that I had to choose.’ Another image opened in his mind’s eye: his own corpse, drifting lifeless and frozen on the edge of a forgotten star system in a future he would not see. ‘I chose to return here with you.’ It had taken him days to decide, to sift through his instincts and reasoned arguments. He had tried to forget what she had told him, what her words had made him see. But the possibility had eaten at his mind. In a galaxy where Horus turned on the Imperium, what other outcome could there be?

  ‘What is the other path?’ he had asked. She had shaken her head.

  ‘Death, Sigismund. Death and sacrifice far away, under the light of an unknown star. Alone and unremembered.’

  She had gone, leaving him alone in a silent corridor.

  ‘That is why I returned to Terra. I said that I was needed here, and I spoke truly.’ Dorn was still not looking at Sigismund. ‘Let them come. I will be here to stand with you, father.’

  Dorn was silent, his face an unmoving echo of the stone statue that looked down at the Investiary floor. He stared at Sigismund, his eyes seeming to pierce the fading light. Sigismund could not look away.

  I have chosen, thought Sigismund. I have chosen to be here at this moment.

  Dorn breathed in the twilight air. He flexed his left hand and watched the movement of his metal-clad fingers. He looked up. Sigismund saw the coldness in his father’s eyes, the icy glitter. He felt the instinct to fall to his knees, to speak again, to say something, to claw back the past. Dorn opened his mouth, his lips moving slowly. When his voice came it was like the whisper of an oncoming storm.

  ‘You have betrayed me,’ said Rogal Dorn. Sigismund staggered. He felt as if the words had flayed away all his conditioning and control. If Dorn noticed the effect of his words he did not pause. ‘We are made to serve. That is our purpose.’ Dorn’s voice echoed off the raked stone tiers of the amphitheatre. He was shaking as if huge forces were straining inside him. It was the most terrifying thing Sigismund had ever seen. ‘Every primarch, every son of a primarch exists to serve the Imperium. Our existence has no other meaning.’ Dorn took a step forwards, his presence seeming to tower taller than the statues of his brothers. ‘Our choices are not our own, our fate is not ours to choose. Your will is mine, and through me the Emperor’s. I trusted you and you squandered that trust on pride and superstition.’

  Sigismund found his voice.

  ‘I stand with you.’ His voice was raw and unfamiliar, a stranger’s words coming from his mouth. ‘I will stand against the enemies of the Imperium until I die.’

  ‘You believed the lies of a charlatan, a demagogue who pretends to powers we fought to free humanity from. I gave you a duty and you turned away from it. Your duty is not here; it was out amongst the stars.’

  ‘Even if this war will be decided here, my lord?’ Sigismund could not believe that he was speaking, but the words came out of him. ‘I saw it. I know it will happen.’

  ‘So certain, so little doubt,’ said Dorn, his voice low. Sigismund could feel the danger in that soft tone. ‘You murder the future. You condemn it with your pessimism and arrogance.’

  ‘I sought only to serve,’ said Sigismund desperately.

  ‘You presume to feel the hand of destiny on your heart. You believe that you see more clearly than I do, than the Emperor does.’ Sigismund heard the judgement in the words, and thought of Horus, of the unknowable reason he had turned against the Imperium, of the other statues that stood above them with hidden faces. Dorn nodded as if seeing the realisation form in Sigismund’s mind. ‘Those are the virtues of a traitor.’

  ‘I am no traitor,’ said Sigismund; the words sounded fragile in his ears, as if they reached him from far away. He was not looking at Dorn, he could not.

  ‘No?’ said Dorn. ‘I say that your duty was to obey, not deceive. I say that the future you think inevitable is a lie. I say all this and yet you do not accept it. Arrogance.’ Dorn spat the word and looked towards the plinth of Horus’s statue ‘Our purpose was defined for us. We are not humans that have the luxury of choice. We are the Emperor’s warriors. We exist to serve, not to rule our own destinies. Turn away from that truth and we corrupt the illumination we were made to spread. It is not just on which side you fight, it is why.’

  Horus, thought Sigismund. He speaks of Horus but condemns me with the same words. Suddenly he felt he saw the architecture of his father’s thoughts, the calculated judgements balanced by beliefs as immovable as mountains. He saw the irreversible logic. There is no way back, no other way for him to judge me. What have I done?

  ‘I serve the Imperium,’ he said, and his voice was shaking.

  ‘You serve your own pride,’ spat Dorn. Sigismund swayed but caught himself. He felt hollow, his mind empty of all of the surety and fire that had defined him. Keeler was wrong, he thought. This was the choice of death alone and unremembered. There is only one path open to me now.

  ‘My lord.’ Sigismund began to kneel.

  ‘You will stand,’ roared Dorn. ‘You have no right to kneel before me.’

  Sigismund drew his sword, its gleaming length coal-black in th
e failing light.

  ‘My life is yours, my lord,’ he said, and turned the sword hilt to Dorn, and bowed his head, the flesh of his neck exposed above the collar of his armour. ‘Take it.’ Dorn reached out and took the sword. His eyes glinted down its length, hard, dangerous, the eyes of death itself.

  Dorn spun the blade, a movement so fast that Sigismund saw it only as a blur. He had an instant to think, to remember the smells of a lost home carried on a dry wind. His father brought the sword down.

  The tip of the sword punched through smooth marble and buried itself a foot deep in stone. Dorn took his hand from the hilt, leaving the blade quivering in front of Sigismund.

  ‘No,’ said Dorn, a low growl. ‘No. The Imperium will endure. But you, you have made your decision. There will be no easy end for you. None will ever know of what you have done. I will not allow your fear and pride to sow doubt in our ranks. Your shame will be yours to bear alone.’

  Sigismund felt as if the Investiary’s vast circumference had closed to a tight circle around him. His body felt distant, the touch of his armour uncomfortable against his skin.

  ‘You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will never know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.’

  Sigismund felt his hearts beating. His mouth was dust dry.

  ‘As you will, father.’

  ‘I am not your father,’ roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air and echoing from the amphitheatre walls. Sigismund fell to the floor. He could feel nothing. A ringing filled his head. It was a scream, he realised. A forgotten scream of loss and pain, mute inside his soul that was no longer human. Dorn looked down at him, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. ‘You are not my son,’ he said quietly. ‘And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’ Dorn turned and walked away.