Knights of the Imperium

by Graham McNeill

  I say, ‘They know we are here to fight for Vondrak, and that is all they need or care to know.’

  The monolithic city walls come into view, and I see the bulky forms of six Knights gathered at the zigzagged approach to the towering gatehouse. The plates of their armour gleam in the rain, reflecting the flames burning in great cog-braziers atop the gatehouse turrets. Their armour is a bold sunrise yellow that reminds me of the Imperial Fists. Yet where the Space Marines of that legendary Chapter are sparing in their honour markings, the Knights of House Hawkshroud show no such restraint.

  Aside from shoulder plates bearing their heraldic crimson-winged aquila, each Knight’s armour is cluttered with all manner of markings. Campaign badges, ragged gonfalons bearing regimental crests, Chapter badges and litanies of past engagements all fight for space to be displayed. There is no order to their application, no consistency of decorative hierarchy in where the markings are painted. The effect is random and intrusive, as though the Knights had once abandoned their armour in a sump-level hab and its hive-scum inhabitants spent days defacing them.

  My first impression of House Hawkshroud is not a good one.

  There is no way to tell who the leader is. All are equally festooned with the insignia of other institutions, worlds and battles. Then one of the Knights steps forward, a Paladin.

  I must assume this is Aktis Bardolf.

  One of his arms is a reaper chainblade, as I bear when on the Cull, but which I exchange out for my relic blade when I don my Lancer armour. The other is the elongated barrel of a rapid-firing battle cannon.

  An archetypal Knight chassis. Well-maintained, though judging by the number of corrosive burns I now see on their legs and weapon mounts, Bardolf and his Knights have recently seen battle.

  That all these scars are upon their frontal armour improves my impression of Hawkshroud immeasurably.

  My Knights slow their forward momentum and come to a halt behind me as I face the Knight Paladin. I stand tall and give a short bow to Hawkshroud’s lead Knight.

  ‘Do I have the honour of addressing Lord Bardolf of House Hawkshroud?’ I ask across the pict-vox. If his armour is equipped as I expect, Aktis Bardolf will be seeing a holographic bust of my head and shoulders.

  My own slate jumps with static, and a face swims into focus, the sallow-skinned man Cordelia saw on the viewing platform.

  ‘I am Aktis Bardolf, but I’m no lord,’ says the image. ‘And I’m guessing you’re Baron Roland of House Cadmus.’

  ‘I am,’ I confirm, guessing that Hawkshroud are not one of those knightly houses with a tradition of long, convoluted protocols of greeting, replete with formal catechisms, that must be spoken before any war-making can begin.

  ‘About time you got here,’ says Bardolf with a wry tone that excuses what I might otherwise take as impertinence.

  Remembering Cordelia’s advice from the night before, I muster my most formal tones and say, ‘Warriors of House Hawkshroud, I, Baron Roland of House Cadmus, formally petition your honourable house for aid in reaching Vikara to rescue the Binary Apostle of Vondrak. How say you, House Hawkshroud?’

  For a moment I think he is going to laugh in my face.

  ‘House Hawkshroud never turns its back on a petition for aid,’ he says, holding his blade over his chest. ‘My reaper and those of my warriors are yours, Magna Preceptor.’

  I am so surprised that I almost forget to accept.

  Once again, I count my blessings to have so beautiful and wise a consort as Cordelia.

  ‘Your honour does you great credit, Sir Bardolf,’ I say.

  He nods and says, ‘We should get moving, Baron Roland. The Binary Apostle isn’t going to rescue himself, is he?’

  I lead the way beyond the city walls, moving swiftly through the outlying port districts surrounding Vondrak Prime. My Lancer is faster than any other Knight, and I advance at speed through the rain, every sense pushed to its limit.

  The normal activity and noise of a busy port facility is utterly absent. The rig crews and bulk stevedores that once toiled to ship thousands of cargo containers off-world now break their backs in the magma-lit forges at the city’s heart.

  Nothing now leaves Vondrak, and the lifter rigs sit idle with long iron arms pulled in tight to heavy, counterbalanced chassis. All the war-materiels produced in the city’s forges are now needed to save the planet itself.

  The tyranid swarms have not yet reached Vondrak Prime, but that they will eventually is not in dispute. Thus far they have been contained by numerous battlefronts some sixty kilometres distant.

  I feel the emptiness of the vast structures around me. Warehouses echo with the drumming of rain on their roofs. Supply depots now lie abandoned.

  The tyranids do not employ overwatching orbital surveyors, but even in the gloaming, the scrapcloth-winged things overhead will see everything that leaves the city.

  And what one beast knows, they all know.

  A machine as large and powerful as a Knight is far from silent, even through heavy rain, so we have not left Vondrak Prime alone. At Arch Magos Kyrano’s suggestion we mask our deployment within a larger one.

  A company of Sable Swords under the command of a captain named Daegan sally forth in the west, while the southern and northern gates disgorge column after column of Colonel Rukanah’s Sipahi, fast-moving formations of armour with powerful, line-breaking weaponry.

  Accompanied by two cohorts of Arch Magos Kyrano’s skitarii and cumbersome war-engines despatched by the Ordo Reductor, Cadmus and Hawkshroud pass through a minor gate towards the south-east. The skitarii and war-engines make a show of taking up defensive positions among the towering structures of the port, and I lead the Knights between narrow canyons of crumbling brickwork, beneath tangles of overhanging steelwork and through billowing clouds of exhaust thermals.

  We will be obscured from the air and have to hope that whatever alien sensory apparatus the flying creatures possess cannot penetrate the tangled architecture of the port.

  I bring my Lancer to a halt at an open junction. Ahead is an enormous turn-plate criss-crossed by deep rail tracks. Used to rotate vast hauler-engines, its piston mechanisms vent pressurised steam.

  Strobing amber lights flash in the hot, wet haze. Open-topped containers lie abandoned on the rails, partially obscured by the fog. A monstrous piece of rolling stock sits at the centre of the turn-plate: a hauler-engine. Its motor cowling is a torn mess of claw marks and bio-acid burns.

  ‘Now, did it take that damage in the mountains and still manage to get here in one piece, or did it bring something nasty with it?’ asks Bardolf as he appears at the opposite corner. The picter element of the vox is inactive. All I hear is his voice.

  ‘I am going to assume the latter,’ I say, indicating torn-open human bodies sprawled around the wreck of the hauler-engine. They have been comprehensively gutted, turned inside out, but not devoured. Each body has been taken apart and its internal organs laid around it in the manner of a Mechanicus adept trying to reverse engineer an unknown piece of archeotech.

  ‘What did this?’ mutters William as he too sees the carnage.

  ‘One of the mantis beasts,’ says Bardolf. ‘Some call it a lictor. I’ve seen this before. They board escaping vehicles without the crew knowing and leave some kind of trail in their wake for the rest of the swarm to follow. They ride with their victims until they think they’re safe and then kill them.’

  ‘You think it’s still here?’ I ask.

  ‘No, it will be long gone by now,’ he says.

  I know Bardolf is probably right. I have fought lictors before and though there is likely only one beast, I know full well the carnage even a single monster can wreak. I push my auspex out to the limit of its range.

  The interior of my armour suddenly feels hot and clammy. I feel the data ghosts within it press against the base of my skull, hungry to
better experience what is happening.

  Sweat beads my skull. The threat auspex hisses. Searching.

  No signal. I cycle through variant spectra.

  Residual radiation flares from empty containers, and conflicting thermals are making it next to impossible to take a reliable reading. Something registers to my right and I step to meet it.

  My lance and relic blade flare with ignition and ammo hoppers shuck shells into the breech of my battle cannon.

  ‘Do you have it?’ snaps Bardolf, and the Hawkshroud Knights spread out, their battle cannons at the ready.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing.’

  The chains of a lifter rig sway in the rain. Rogue mechanical surge or a passing creature? I cannot say.

  ‘Move out,’ I order, knowing that jumping at shadows is just as dangerous to our mission as advancing heedlessly. ‘William, Roderick, move out in echelon behind me. Anthonis, with me. Sir Bardolf, have your Knights circle south around the turn-plate. The entrance to the tunnel network is on the other side.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Bardolf, and Hawkshroud step off.

  I lead Cadmus over the turn-plate, careful not to crush any of the bodies beneath the articulated claw-feet of my armour. There is no blood around any of them. The rain could have washed it away, but I fear it is more likely that these poor souls were killed far from here and laid out for others to find. Terror is as much part of the swarm’s weaponry as teeth and claws and acid sprays.

  We pass the wreckage of the hauler-engine, weapons loaded and primed. Every blip of the auspex sends a jolt along my spine, and it is an effort of will to keep from firing at every shadow.

  Then we are across the turn-plate, and not a moment too soon.

  ‘Weather’s clearing,’ says Sir Roderick.

  I look up, and see he is correct. The rain is easing and the clouds are beginning to part. Within minutes there will be no cover to keep us from sight.

  ‘Sir Bardolf,’ I say. ‘Time to get underground.’

  I march to where a soaring rhomboidal archway plunges into a metal-framed structure from which numerous rails emerge. This leads beneath the surface of Vondrak and courses through the bedrock of the mountains. Over the thousands of kilometres of the underground line’s length, many branches split away, each working their way back to the surface and an entrance to one of the many deep-core mineholds.

  Vikara is four kilometres from one such minehold.

  These entrances will have been blocked with demolition charges, but not in any way we cannot break through with thermal lances and battle cannons. This entrance has purposely been left open for us, though I see looping cables linking hard-packed demo charges around the archway.

  ‘I thought you were joking,’ says Bardolf as his armour’s suit lights ignite. ‘And this is the only way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I hear his sigh over the vox. ‘Of course, you understand that the auspex readings down there are likely to be even worse than on the surface.’

  ‘I understand that, but it is four hundred kilometres to Vikara as the eagle flies,’ I tell him. ‘And we cannot hope to travel that far overground without detection.’

  ‘Then I hope you know the way.’

  I call a topographical map of the underground network onto my navigational slate. Arch Magos Kyrano had had the controller of the rail network, a behemoth of a man by the name of Topham, provide us with the most up-to-date schematic of the subterranean network.

  I exload the map to my Knights and those of Hawkshroud as my stablights pierce the darkness of the tunnel. Bardolf’s lights join those of my Knights.

  None illuminate more than fifty metres.

  ‘Gregor, Martyn,’ I say, ‘take position within the archway and ensure that nothing follows us in.’

  ‘And that nothing comes out but us,’ adds Bardolf.

  ‘Blow these charges if it looks like a full assault coming through this tunnel,’ I tell Sir Gregor. ‘Whether we are still beneath or not. Understood?’

  Both Knights signal their understanding, and I step towards the tunnel entrance. Aktis Bardolf accompanies me.

  ‘You’ve seen the update stamp on this, I take it?’ he asks.

  I have been waiting for this.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Seventy-four years ago.’

  ‘So what’s down there now might bear no relation to this map of yours.’

  ‘That is true,’ I say, ‘but the Emperor will protect and watch over us in the darkness.’

  I ride into the inky blackness of the tunnel before Bardolf or any of my Knights can gainsay me.

  Xenosign

  The pen scratched across the surface of the paper with quick, urgent strokes. Cassia could always tell which pages she’d written when Malcolm was at war. Even though he was still within the walls of Vondrak Prime – a snub to her husband if ever there was one – he was still joined with his armour.

  The pages of this particular book were fresh and new, a recent purchase from the local commercia. Cassia hadn’t ventured out herself; she’d despatched one of the child servants assigned to Cadmus to find her a blank book. It had taken the vacant-eyed simpleton nearly a day to return, but it had been worth the wait.

  Cassia enjoyed the different smells of each world’s paper, the subtle scents pressed into each one as she set down the day’s events, conversations and thoughts.

  Raisa’s paper smelled earthy and smoky, like it had been stored in a damp cellar for years. Gryphonne IV’s paper was glossy and tear-resistant. It left a greasy, chemical residue on her fingertips as she turned each page. Vondrak’s paper had a pleasingly crude, grainy texture and smelled of ash and woodsmoke. Cassia would send the boy out again tomorrow for another, assuming he could remember which shopkeeper had sold him the book.

  Cassia looked up from her book as a cold draught sighed down the empty corridor. She sat in a wide window alcove in the upper reaches of Lord Ohden’s keep. She’d needed some solitude to gather her thoughts, but solitude was in short supply in the consorts’ quarters.

  Aikaterina’s brat was playing up again, and his caterwauling was uniquely capable of passing through walls of solid stone and doors of reinforced steel. She’d left without an escort to explore the keep and find some peace and quiet to write in her journal.

  William and Aikaterina had grand visions of their son becoming a Knight of Cadmus, but Cassia had her doubts. Unless he toughened up, and fast, the child would never survive the Rite of Becoming. What a young man felt as he sat in the Throne Mechanicus would always be part of him, and that child was frightened of his own shadow.

  Cassia’s quill flicked across the page. She and Malcolm had not yet been gifted with a child, but that day would come soon enough. Malcolm’s seed was strong, and Cassia’s lineage filled with wide-hipped women who’d borne many strong sons and sturdy daughters. When she decided it was time for Malcolm to provide her with a child, Cassia wouldn’t let a screaming infant shame her with its crying.

  She paused in her writing to look down through the coloured glass of the window at the city below. Vondrak Prime was girding its loins for battle. Aeliana said she’d overheard the Sacristans say that the xenoswarms had broken through the southern front and were advancing on the city.

  Even if that were true, it gave Cassia no cause for concern.

  She’d read the informationals. Hive Fleet Hydra was a minor swarm, not even close to the strength of Leviathan. She’d seen battlefields and the preparations for war a hundred times. This one was no different to any other, and one lost battlefront was no reason to panic.

  Cassia looked away from the scenes of war preparation and gasped in surprise.

  She was no longer alone.

  A black-robed adept stood with his hands laced before him and his hood drawn up over his head. The soft glow of augmetics and the gleam of nearby lumens
on a ceramic faceplate were the only hints of what lay beneath the hood.

  ‘Apologies, Lady Cassia,’ said the adept. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t damn well sneak up on me like some kind of bloody assassin,’ snapped Cassia, shutting her book and smoothing down her dress. She searched his robes for some identifying signifier, a stitched rune or Cog or aquila, but there was nothing.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘And how do you know my name?’

  ‘My name is Adept Nemonix,’ said the adept. ‘And I make it my business to know a great many things.’

  ‘Are you Mechanicus?’

  ‘I serve the will of the Omnissiah, yes,’ he said. ‘Though not in a capacity with which you would be familiar.’

  ‘That’s no kind of answer.’

  ‘May I sit?’ asked Nemonix, then did so before she could say otherwise. Even the light coming through the window seemed reluctant to venture beneath his hood. She saw the dim outline of a porcelain mask with a single glowing orb at its centre and three vertical slits where she would expect to find his mouth.

  Despite his inhuman appearance, his manner was curiously human and the voice entirely organic. Cassia was instantly suspicious.

  ‘What do you want, Adept Nemonix?’

  ‘Is that an actual book you’re reading?’ he asked, ignoring her question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know how rare it is for people to actually read a book made of paper these days? Fewer than one in thirty thousand ever bother to read anything that isn’t on a slate or a devotional pamphlet. I find that immeasurably sad. It’s just not the same without the smell of a new book’s pages or the texture of its paper under your fingertips.’

  Cassia smiled in agreement and glanced down at Nemonix’s hands. They were utterly smooth, like those of a dressmaker’s mannequin. She couldn’t picture him with a book.

  ‘We agree on that, at least,’ said Cassia.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, what are you reading?’

  ‘The Spheres of Longing,’ said Cassia, the first book that leapt to mind when she pictured Malcolm’s bookshelves. The idea of telling this adept of her journal seemed wrong on a fundamental level.