by Various
By the time we reached the Khan’s chambers I had no idea how far we’d come – such enormous battleships were more like cities than vessels of war. We eventually stopped before a pair of ivory-inlaid doors flanked by two enormous guards in ceremonial armour. I recognised the cumbersome outline of antique Thunder Armour, heavily altered and edged with gold. Unlike Yesugei, the guards wore their helms, which were slit-visored and gilded, and topped with horsehair plumes.
As the Stormseer approached them, they bowed, then grasped two heavy bronze handles set into the doors.
‘Prepared?’ asked Yesugei.
I could feel my heart hammering. Light was bleeding out of the cracks under the doors.
‘No,’ I said.
The doors opened.
For a split second, I saw absolutely nothing. I had the blurred impression of a corona of light, dancing in front of me as if reflected from water. I could sense enormous energy, enormous power burning away, thundering within its bonds like the caged heart of a reactor.
At the time I was unsure if I was sensing him as he truly was, my unpractised gaze piercing some carefully constructed veil of artifice and into his true nature beneath, or whether the sickness of the ascent from Ullanor had simply addled my senses.
I only knew one thing: that I had to keep my feet, to keep my eyes open. Yesugei had said it would pass.
‘General Ilya Ravallion of the Departmento Munitorum.’
As soon as he spoke, the details of the room sank into focus, like an old physical pictograph being developed in a bath of chemicals. The chamber was large, with grand, high windows that flooded it with filtered light from Ullanor’s sun.
I bowed my head clumsily.
‘Khan,’ I replied, disliking the thin sound of my voice in contrast to the richness of his.
‘Sit, general,’ he said. ‘There is a chair here for you.’
I walked towards it. As I did so, I began to take in my surroundings. The walls were panelled with dark, sleek wood, like Terran mahogany. A thick rug lay under my feet, woven coarsely with images of arid plains and spear-carrying riders leaning in the saddle. I saw an antique bookcase lined with old leather-bound books. There were weapons hung against the walls – swords, bows, flintlocks, armour from other ages and other worlds. Smells of earth and metal rose up to meet me, acrid with the tang of buckskin, burned charcoal and burnishing oils.
I sat in the seat that had been prepared for me. I heard the gentle ticking of an old clock on a stone mantelpiece and the very faint, very distant hum of starship engines.
Only then did I have the courage to look at him.
His face was the same leather-brown as Yesugei’s. It was a lean face, noble and fiercely intelligent, and proud. His scalp was bald save for a long top-knot of ink-black hair bound with rings of gold. An aquiline nose ran down a wind-toughened, moustached face. His eyes were sunk deep under bony brows, and they glittered like pearls set in bronze.
He sat at ease, his immense body stretched back in his own chair, which was twice the size of mine. One gloved hand rested on an ivory arm, the other hung casually over the edge. I had the image of an apex-feline lounging in the dappled shade, resting its tremendous strength for a moment between hunts.
I could barely move. My heart was thudding.
‘So,’ said the Khan. He spoke in a cultured, patrician drawl. ‘What did you wish to speak to me about?’
I looked into his glittering eyes to reply. It was then that I realised, with a lurch of horror, that I couldn’t remember.
Jaghatai Khan receives his guest aboard the flagship
Yesugei joined us then, standing at his primarch’s shoulder and calmly explaining the circumstances of our meeting on Ullanor. I learned later that he’d been at my side the whole time, staying close in case I’d been overwhelmed. That was a kindness I have never forgotten.
As he spoke, and as the Khan responded, I recovered myself. I sat up straight in my chair, recalling my mission in all its detail. Even then I was struck by the irony of the situation – the one thing I had always been able to rely on, my memory, undone in an instant by the figure before me.
‘So what more do they want of us?’ asked the Khan drily, still speaking to Yesugei. ‘More conquests? Faster?’
His tone was that of a weary patriarch, indulging the paltry concerns of subjects far below him in stature and nobility. Unlike Yesugei, his spoken Gothic was perfect, albeit with the same dense accent as his Stormseer.
‘Lord,’ I said, hoping my voice didn’t shake as I spoke, ‘the Departmento has no complaint about the speed of the Fifth Legion’s progress.’
Both the Khan and Yesugei turned to look at me.
I swallowed, and felt the dryness at the back of my throat.
‘The matter is rather different,’ I went on, holding the primarch’s gaze with difficulty. ‘Senior strategeos have found it challenging to retain an adequate picture of your movements. This has consequences. We cannot keep you resupplied as we would like. We cannot arrange coordination with your accompanying Army regiments. You are due to rendezvous with the 915th Expeditionary Fleet, but we still do not have confirmation of your onward destination.’
The Khan’s face was like a mask. His expression didn’t alter, although I could sense his disappointment.
I felt ludicrous. He was a total warrior, a machine bred by the Emperor to destroy worlds. He didn’t want to discuss supply chains.
‘Do you think, general,’ he asked, ‘that you are the first to complain of this to me?’
His tone – casual, courteous, disinterested – was crushing. I doubt he meant it to be, but it was all the same.
They can kill with a word.
‘No, lord,’ I said, trying to hold my nerve, determined to keep to my mission. ‘I am aware that seventeen Legion-level communications have been made from Terra to your command staff.’
‘Seventeen, is it?’ he said, his lids heavy. ‘I lose count. And what do you hope to add to them?’
‘Those delegations did not have the honour of speaking to you in person, lord,’ I said. ‘I had hoped that, if I could explain the situation clearly, then we might be able to determine a revised framework for logistics liaison. It is something the Departmento would dearly like to negotiate.’
As soon as I used the words ‘revised framework for logistics liaison’, I knew I’d lost him. He looked at me directly, half-bemused, half-irritated. He shifted in his chair, and even in that miniscule movement I sensed something of the futility of what I was trying to do.
He hated being seated. He hated talking. He hated being cooped up inside the walls of his battleship. He wanted to be on campaign, lost in the pursuit, deploying his phenomenal strength in the eternal chase.
He never forgets the shape of the hunt.
‘Are you Terran?’ he asked.
The question came from nowhere, but I remembered Yesugei’s words and didn’t blink.
‘I am, lord.’
‘I thought so,’ said the Khan. ‘You think like a Terran. I have warriors in my Legion who are Terrans, and they think like you too.’
He sat forward a little in his chair, clasping his gloved hands together in front of him.
‘This is what you want,’ he said. ‘You want to see the Legions march out from Terra in ordered lines, plodding like aduun, each one leaving a trail behind it leading back to the home world along which you can plot your convoys of arms and rations. You think like this because your world is one of complexity – of cities, of settled nations – and such a world needs tethering.’
He was right. That was what I wanted.
‘That is not what we want,’ said the Khan. ‘On Chogoris we learned to fight without a centre. We took our arms and our mounts with us. We moved as the pattern of war dictated. We did not tie ourselves down. We have never done that.’
His deep-set eyes held me as he spoke. His voice was never raised. He was not angry with me; he spoke calmly, like an austere parent patientl
y explaining a simple matter to a child.
‘The armies we fought were bigger than ours,’ he said. ‘Our movement was our advantage. They could not strike at our centre, because we had no centre. We have never forgotten that lesson.’
I understood then why all our delegations had failed to make an impression on him. The White Scars were not hard to organise because of carelessness – it was a point of principle for them, a doctrine of war.
Perhaps I should have said nothing then and accepted the failure of my mission, but I was unwilling to let the matter lie. Fighting on Chogoris on horseback was one thing; a Crusade of trillions across the galaxy was another.
‘But lord,’ I said, ‘after Ullanor, there are no bigger armies. We are advancing, not defending, and such work requires coordination. And, forgive me, but surely you agree that there are no threats to Terra. Nothing remains that could harm us.’
The Khan looked at me in his frosty, jaded way. My words had not impressed him. I felt the full weight of his disappointment, and that alone was hard to bear.
‘Nothing remains that could harm us,’ he repeated softly. ‘I wonder, Yesugei, how many times, and in how many forgotten empires, those words have been spoken.’
He was no longer addressing me. He had moved on, discussing the paths of history with his own kind. I had been cast aside, just like all the others who had attempted to drag him back into the rigid structures of the Imperium. I was nothing to him; the work of the Departmento was nothing. The months of travel, of research, of preparation, they had all been for nothing.
I was furious with myself, and burned with frustration. At that point I assumed that I sat face-to-face with the greatest and most powerful warrior I would ever meet, and that I had squandered the opportunity to influence him.
I was wrong about that, as it turned out, on both counts.
He burst in with no warning, no prior announcement. The doors thudded back on their hinges, startling me.
He swept into the room, clad in a thick wolf-pelt mantle that swayed with his resounding strides. His armour was white gold, swirled and rich like mother-of-pearl, rimmed with hammered bronze and with a lustrous, garnet-red eye emblazoned across the breastplate. He radiated enormity – of body, of mind, of spirit. He moved with a generous vigour, with confidence, with a soldier’s swagger.
I had seen picts of him, of course. We all had. I had never expected to witness him up close, to be in the presence of such a figure of legend and whispered rumour.
I shrank back in my chair, clutching the arms of it tight, fearful that I would pass out or do something stupid.
The Khan leapt to his feet, hurrying to greet him with a smile breaking out across his face. I was instantly forgotten; a mundane smudge against the splendour of reunited gods.
‘My brother,’ said the Khan, embracing him.
‘Jaghatai,’ said Horus Lupercal.
My heart was thudding in my chest. I became terrified that one of them would turn on me and ask me what I was still doing there. I wanted to leave, but I wouldn’t have dared to move, not without being given permission, so I stayed where I was, wishing the chair would fold up over me.
I should have been filled with awe and joy at the sight of the Warmaster. I should have felt my heart bloom with pride and gratitude that I, one mortal among trillions, had been placed in the presence of the Emperor’s chosen. For whatever reason, the only thing I felt was fear. I saw my knuckles turn white. I said nothing. It felt as if a cold wind had raced through the chamber, chilling it and making my soul shiver.
Yesugei was introduced to him, and the Stormseer took it in his stride, as calm and phlegmatic as ever. Then Horus’s gaze – his terrible, searching gaze – moved beyond his brother and settled on me.
My heart seemed to stop. I was powerless to react, or even to look away. It was a pure, primal terror; that of prey that knows it cannot escape.
‘And who is she?’ Horus asked.
The Khan placed his hand on his brother’s arm.
‘One of the Sigillite’s bureaucrats.’ He glanced briefly in my direction. ‘She has my countenance.’
When they turned away, falling into conversation with one another once more, I felt as if an iron vice had been loosed from around my heart.
Where the Khan had been hard to deal with, Horus was overwhelming. The two primarchs were of similar build – the Khan might even have been slightly taller – but it was obvious to me why Horus had been chosen to be the Emperor’s instrument; the dynamism of his gestures, the openness in his face, the sense of effortless power that cascaded from his ornate armour and spilled out across the room. Even amidst the inexplicable dread that reached up to choke me, I understood why men worshipped him.
I struggled to reconcile what I saw with what I felt. The Khan and Horus were obviously brothers. They talked and goaded one another like brothers, speaking of galaxy-spanning matters that I could not understand as if they were pieces of trivia to toy with and argue over. For all that, they were not equals. The Khan was dominating, brooding, austere, magnificent.
Horus was… something else.
The encounter between them was a brief one. By the time I dared to listen, it was almost over.
‘For all that, believe me, I am shamed by this, brother,’ said Horus, looking apologetic.
‘You should not be,’ said the Khan.
‘If there had been any other choice…’
‘You do not have to explain. In any case, I have already given you my word.’
Horus looked at the Khan gratefully.
‘I know,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Your word means a great deal. To our Father, too, I am sure.’
The Khan raised an eyebrow, and Horus laughed. Laughing freed up his features. The Warmaster’s habitual demeanour was one of raw, passionate exuberance, as if some reflected glory or perfection of the Emperor’s will lingered in the cut of his martial features.
‘It isn’t all bad,’ Horus said. ‘Chondax is barren, suited to your Legion’s strengths. You’ll enjoy the hunting.’
The Khan nodded readily enough, though, to me, it looked like the gesture of one who knows that the best is being made of a poor situation. ‘We are not hungry for glory,’ he said. ‘Running down Urrlak’s dregs needs to be done, and we are equipped to do it. But what then? That is what concerns me.’
Horus clapped his gauntlet on to the Khan’s shoulder. Even that simple movement – the faint shift of posture, the upward sweep of his arm – gave away the primarch’s warrior-balance. Every gesture was so painfully elegant, so beautifully efficient, so tightly packed with self-assured, superabundant power. They were both creatures of a more exalted plane, shackled only loosely to the stuff of mortal existence.
‘Then we should fight together again, you and I,’ Horus said. ‘It has been too long, and I miss your presence. Things are uncomplicated with you. I wish you would not hide yourself away.’
‘I can usually be found, in the end.’
Horus shot him a wry look.
‘In the end,’ he said. Then his expression became serious. ‘The galaxy is changing. There is much I do not understand about it, and much I do not like. Warriors should remain close. I hope that I can call upon you, if the time comes.’
The two primarchs looked one another in the eye. I could imagine them fighting together, and I shuddered a little at the prospect. Such an alliance would make the foundations of the galaxy tremble.
‘You know you can, brother,’ said the Khan. ‘That is always how it has been between us. You call, I answer.’
I could hear the sincerity in his voice; he meant it. I could hear the admiration, too, and the warmth. They were hewn from the same stone.
I held my breath. For whatever reason, I felt that something significant, something irrevocable, had taken place.
You call, I answer.
After that they left the room together, marching in step, locked in conversation. Yesugei went with them.
The cham
ber fell still. I could hear the ticks of the clock, as loud in my ears as my own heartbeat. For a long time, I couldn’t move. My cloying sense of dread faded slowly. When I finally unclenched my fingers from the arm of the chair, I was still trembling. Thoughts and images raced through my mind, jostling in a mad rush of dazzling impressions.
Only slowly did it dawn on me that I had been abandoned in the heart of a Legion battleship with no obvious means of finding my way out. I guessed that my rank would count for little in such a place.
That wasn’t the worst of it. I had seen – just briefly – the way in which the Great Crusade was really ordered, and it made my tiny role seem even more insignificant than I had thought. We were nothing to them, those armour-bound gods.
As I reflected on that, the idea of trying to debate war policy with a primarch felt less like vainglory and more like insanity.
Still, I had seen them. I had witnessed what countless career soldiers would have happily died to witness. Despite my failure, that was worth something.
I got up from the chair shakily, steeling myself to go back into the corridor outside. I didn’t relish the prospect of meeting those guards again.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Yesugei returned, slipping silently back through the doors and giving me a conspiratorial smile.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That was unexpected.’
‘It was,’ I replied. My voice was still weak.
‘Primarch and Warmaster,’ said Yesugei. ‘You did well.’
I laughed, more for the release of tension than anything else.
‘I did?’ I said. ‘I almost lost consciousness.’
‘It happens,’ he said. ‘How you feel?’
I rolled my eyes.
‘I made a fool of myself,’ I said. ‘This was a waste of time – of your time. I’m sorry.’
Yesugei shrugged. ‘Do not apologise,’ he said. ‘The Khan does nothing wastefully.’