by Nick Kyme
‘Now do you understand the futility of what you do here?’ said the golden giant.
Long dark hair spilled around the warrior’s face, a face that Uriah could only see through the hazy lens of memory. He could see the unremarkable features of Revelation subsumed into the warrior’s countenance, itself so worthy of devotion that it took all Uriah’s self-control not to drop to his knees and offer what remained of his life to its glorification.
‘You…’ repeated Uriah, the pain in his bones no match for the pain in his heart. ‘You are the… the… Emperor…’
‘I am, and it is time to go, Uriah,’ said the Emperor.
Uriah looked around at his now gleaming and brightly lit church. ‘Go? Go where? There is nowhere else for me in this godless world of yours.’
‘Of course there is,’ replied the Emperor. ‘Embrace the new way and be part of something incredible. A world and a time where we stand on the brink of achieving everything we ever dreamed.’
Uriah nodded dumbly and felt a firm hand gently take his arm and lift him to his feet once more. Strength flowed from the Emperor’s grip and Uriah felt the aches and ailments that had plagued him for decades fade until they were little more than evil memories.
He looked up at Isandula Verona’s magnificent fresco, and the breath caught in his throat. Colours once dulled by the darkness now blazed with life and the ceiling seemed to burst with life and vitality as the Emperor’s light gave it fresh animation and vibrancy. The skin of the painted figures shone with vitality, and the livid blues and lusty reds radiated potency.
‘Verona’s work was never meant for darkness,’ said the Emperor. ‘Only in the light can it achieve its full potential. Humanity is the same, and only when the suffocating shadows of a religion that teaches us not to question is gone from this world will we see its true brilliance.’
Uriah only reluctantly tore his eyes from the impossibly beautiful fresco and cast his gaze around his church. The stained-glass windows shone with new life and the intricate, subtle architecture of the interior gleamed with the skill of its builders.
‘I will miss this place,’ said Uriah.
‘In time I will build an Imperium of such grandeur and magnificence that this will seem like a pauper’s hovel,’ said the Emperor. ‘Now, let us be on our way.’
Uriah allowed himself to be guided down the nave, his heart heavy with the knowledge that the course of his life had been altered by, at best, a misunderstanding, at worst, a lie. As he followed the Emperor towards the narthex doors, he looked up at the ceiling once more, recalling the sermons he had delivered here, the people who had hung on his every word and the good that had flowed from this place and into the world.
He smiled suddenly as he realised that it didn’t matter whether his life and faith had been based on a falsehood. He had believed what he had seen and he had come to this place with a heart open and emptied by grief. That openness had allowed the spirit of his god to enter his soul and filled the emptiness within him with love.
What makes faith so powerful is that it requires no proof. Belief is enough.
He had devoted his life to his god, and even with the understanding of how his fate had been manipulated by random chance, he found no resentment in his heart. He had spread a doctrine of love and forgiveness from his pulpit and no amount of clever words would make him regret that.
The door to the narthex was still open and, as they passed through its cold embrace, the Emperor pushed open the main doors of the church.
Howling wind and sheets of rain blew inwards and Uriah clasped his robes tightly to his body, feeling the night’s cold stab into his body like a thousand shards of ice.
He looked over his shoulder towards the altar of his church, seeing the lone candle beside the doomsday clock snuffed out by the gale.
Once again, his church was swathed in darkness and he sighed to see this last illumination extinguished. The wind blew the internal doors shut and Uriah followed the Emperor out into the darkness.
Rain soaked him instantly and a crash of lightning lit the heavens with an actinic blue glow. Hundreds of warriors stood in ordered ranks before the church, brutal giants in pugnacious armour he had last seen on the battlefield of Gaduare.
They stood immobile beneath the downpour, the rain beating against the burnished plates of bronze in an unrelenting tattoo and causing their scarlet helmet plumes to hang limply at their shoulders. There had been some refinements, saw Uriah, the armour now all-enclosing and each warrior sealed from the elements by an interlocking series of artfully designed plates.
Huge backpacks vented excess heat in steaming plumes like breath, and each of the warriors carried a burning torch that hissed and fizzed in the downpour. Huge guns were slung over their shoulders and Uriah shivered as he remembered the murderous volley, like the thunder at the end of the world, that had felled so many of his comrades.
The Emperor put a long cloak about Uriah’s shoulders as a group of armoured warriors stepped towards the church with flame lances raised. Uriah wanted to protest, to speak out against what they were about to do, but the words died in his throat as he realised they would have no effect.
Tears streamed down his face along with the rain as torrents of flame erupted from the warriors’ weapons and licked over the roof and walls of the church. Other warriors fired grenades that smashed through the stained-glass windows of the church and percussive booms thudded from inside as the hungry flames took hold of the roof.
Thick smoke billowed from the windows, the rain doing nothing to dampen the destructive ambition of the flames, and Uriah wept to think of the wondrous fresco and the thousands of years of history that was being destroyed.
He turned to look up at the Emperor, the warrior’s face lit by the fires of destruction.
‘How can you do this?’ demanded Uriah. ‘You say you stand for reason and the advancement of understanding, but here you are destroying a repository of knowledge!’
The Emperor looked down at him and said, ‘Some things are best left forgotten.’
‘Then I hope you have foreseen the consequences of a world bereft of religion.’
‘I have,’ replied the Emperor. ‘It is my dream. An Imperium of Man that exists without recourse to gods and the supernatural. A united galaxy with Terra at its heart.’
‘A united galaxy?’ said Uriah, averting his gaze from his blazing church as he finally grasped the scale of the Emperor’s ambition.
‘Indeed. Now that Unity has been achieved on Terra, it is time to reclaim humanity’s lost empire among the stars.’
‘With you at its head, I presume?’ said Uriah.
‘Of course. Nothing of such grand scale can be achieved without a singular vision at its heart, least of all the reconquest of the galaxy.’
‘You are a madman,’ said Uriah. ‘And you are arrogant if you believe you can subjugate the stars with warriors such as these. They are powerful to be sure, but even they are not capable of such a thing.’
‘You are right,’ agreed the Emperor. ‘I will not conquer the galaxy with these men, for they are but men. These are the precursors to the warriors I am forging in my gene-labs, warriors with the strength and power and vision to bestride the battlefields of the stars and bring them to compliance. These warriors shall be my generals and they will lead my great crusade to the furthest corners of the galaxy.’
‘Didn’t you just tell me of the bloody slaughters perpetrated by crusaders?’ said Uriah. ‘Doesn’t that make you no better than the holy men you were telling me about?’
‘The difference is I know I am right,’ said the Emperor.
‘Spoken like a true autocrat.’
The Emperor shook his head. ‘You misunderstand, Uriah. I have seen the narrow survival path that is all that stands between humanity and extinction, and this is the way it must begin.’
Uriah looked back at the church, the gleeful flames reaching high into the darkness.
‘It is a dangerous
road you travel,’ said Uriah. ‘To deny humanity a thing will only make them crave it all the more. And if you succeed in this grand vision of yours? What then? Beware that your subjects do not begin to see you as a god.’
Uriah looked into the Emperor’s face as he spoke, now seeing past the glamours and the magnificence to the heart of an individual who had lived a thousand lives and walked the Earth for longer than could be imagined. He saw the ruthless ambition and the molten core of violence at the Emperor’s heart. In that instant, Uriah knew he wanted nothing to do with anything this man had to offer, no matter how noble or lofty his ambitions might be.
‘I hope in the name of all that is holy you are right,’ said Uriah, ‘but I dread the future you are forging for humanity.’
‘I wish only the best for my people,’ promised the Emperor.
‘I think you do, but I will not be a part of it,’ said Uriah, casting off the Emperor’s cloak and walking back towards his church with his head held high. The rain beat down on him, but he welcomed it as a baptismal.
He heard footsteps approaching him, but he heard the Emperor say, ‘No. Leave him.’
The outer doors of the church stood open and Uriah walked into the narthex, feeling the heat of the flames as they billowed around him. The statues were on fire and the doors to the nave were gone, blown off their hinges by the blasts of grenades.
Uriah marched into the blazing heat of the church, seeing a wall of flame devouring the pews and silken hangings with insatiable hunger. Smoke filled the air and the fresco above him was almost obscured by the roiling blackness.
He looked at the clock face on the altar and smiled as the flames closed in around him.
THE WARRIORS REMAINED outside the church until it collapsed, the roof timbers crashing down into the building in a tremendous flurry of flying sparks and wreckage. They stayed until the first rays of sunlight crested the mountains and the rain finally extinguished the last of the flames.
The ruins of the last church on Terra smouldered in the chill morning air as the Emperor turned away and said, ‘Come, we have a galaxy to conquer.’
As the Emperor and his warriors marched down the hillside, the only sound to be heard was the soft chiming of an old and broken clock.
AFTER DESH’EA
Matthew Farrer
‘YOU DON’T HAVE to do this,’ said Dreagher, breaking the long silence, and the relaxing of tension from the other War Hounds was audible even without Astartes senses. Kharn looked around the loose square of warriors and saw sneaking relief in their expressions.
Someone had finally come out and said it.
‘You need not do it.’ Dreagher could not quite bring himself to step between Kharn and the doors, but his voice was steady. ‘You should not do it.’
But other signs gave the lie to the composure in Dreagher’s voice. Kharn watched his fellow captain’s respiration move at just below combat-preparation speed, watched the veins in his face and shorn scalp tick at an elevated rate, took in the motions of his eyes, the subtle shifts of his shoulders as his body went through the muscle-loosening routines that had been part of their deep conditioning.
Dreagher’s skin carried the scent of scouring-gel but underneath it, coming off his skin, was the scent of adrenaline and the inhuman essences that the Astartes body made for itself when the danger instincts rang.
They were all keyed up; Kharn’s own metabolism was escalated too. He could hardly have helped it. The air cyclers had not yet been able to carry away the tang of blood that had washed through the anteroom the last time the double doors had opened.
As Kharn worked his palate and tongue, processing and tasting the air, he realised something else: the rest of the ship had fallen as silent as the anteroom they stood in. The anteroom’s semicircular outer wall opened through to the barrack-decks, and normally the broad colonnade was alive with sounds. Voices, the clank of boots and the softer tread of the menials and technomats, the distant sound of shots from the ranges, the almost subsonic buzz of the new power weapons, all gone now. The decks were as silent as the great chamber beyond the steel-grey double doors at Dreagher’s back. The strangeness of that silence tautened his nerves and muscles further still.
Kharn ignored his body, letting it do what it will. He kept his eyes cold.
‘Eighth Company makes me the ranking captain aboard, now,’ he told them. ‘My rank, my oath and my Emperor. Together they close the matter. In case anyone is insolent enough to think there’s even a matter to close.’
‘No,’ came a voice from beside him. Jareg, the Master Shellsmith from the artillery echelon. ‘The matter to close is that we must find a way to, to…’ Jareg motioned wordlessly towards the doors, face twisted in distress.
‘We… don’t know how this will end,’ said Horzt, commander of the Ninth Company’s Stormbird squadron. Kharn watched the man’s hands form fists, shaking to match the shake in his voice. ‘And so we have to plan for the worst. One of us here, now, may need to command the Legion yet, and—’
He broke off. In the space beyond the doors a voice, deeper than a tank-rumble, mightier than a cannon-blast, was roaring in anger. If there were words to it, they were blurred and muffled by the slabs of metal in the way, but still the War Hounds fell silent. They had shouted oaths and orders and obscenities over the clamour of gun, grenade and chainaxe, over the scream of Stormbird jets, over the keen and bellow of a dozen different xenos, but Kharn was the only one who dared to speak now over that distant, muted voice.
‘Enough,’ he said, and his voice was flat. ‘I’m not stupid enough to deny what we all think and know. You all owe Horzt a salute for being the only one to find enough Astartes guts in his belly to say it. The Emperor has brought us our lord and commander. The heartspring of our own bloodline. That is who is with us now. Our general. The one of whom we are echoes. Do you remember that? Do you?’ Kharn looked from one to the next, and the War Hounds stared back at him. Good. He would have struck any of them who hadn’t met his eyes. On the other side of the scarred grey plate of the doors, the distant voice roared again.
‘Now, this,’ he went on, ‘this thing we are doing here, this is right. It is not for any Lord Commander, it is not for any high-helmed, gilt-edged custodian, it is not for anyone—’ his shout stiffened their backs, widened their eyes ‘—to come between the War Hounds and their primarch and live. Only for the Emperor himself will we stand aside, and the Emperor has shown his wisdom. He has taken this duty and he has laid it on our shoulders.’
He looked at Dreagher again. Like Kharn, the man was dressed in white, bands of blue glittering across the high-collared tunic, boots and gauntlets a dark ceremonial blue rather than functional shipboard grey. The Emperor’s lightning-bolt emblem gleamed at his collar and shoulder. His dress matched Kharn’s own: the formal garments with which the War Hounds symbolised they were about their most solemn business. It was obvious why. Dreagher wanted to go in Kharn’s place. Wanted to go in and die.
‘We have our primarch now,’ Kharn told them, and even now he felt a little shiver at the words. All these years since they had launched outwards from Terra, watching as one mighty creation after another emerged from unreclaimed space to take their places in the ranks. Kharn had heard how the Salamanders had waited in orbit around the burning moon, waited for the Emperor’s word that the one he had found there was indeed their sire. He remembered the first sight of chilly-eyed Perturabo walking at the Emperor’s shoulder the day they took ship for Nove Shendak, and the change in the Iron Warriors when they knew who was to command them. Every Legion still with that empty place at its head felt the same longing, sharper with every voyage, every campaign. Would this next star be the one where their blood-sire lived? Would this ship, this communiqué, bring the news that their father-commander had been found, out there in the dark? And then that electric day when the word had come to the mustering docks at Vueron, the news that their own primarch had been found, their lord, their alpha, their… And i
t had come to this.
‘We have our primarch now,’ he repeated, ‘and he will lead his Legion in whatever manner he chooses. We are his just as we are the Emperor’s. What we wish or plan no longer matters. The commander of the War Hounds will meet the primarch of the War Hounds, and what happens will be as the primarch wills it. So be it. No more talk.’
Besides, he thought as Dreagher saluted and silently walked to the doors, I don’t suppose it will be long before he works his way down to you. He was surprised at the thought, but surprised also at the lack of emotion that came with it. For all that the War Hounds were a hot-blooded Legion, Kharn found his thoughts flat and colourless. He took a moment to wonder if this were how others felt, the enemies who had advanced to their doom under War Hound chainaxes, or the condemned men of the auxilia in the days before the Emperor had banned the Legion from decimating allies who disgraced them on the field.
Dreagher worked the key controls and the doors swung silently outwards. Beyond them, oddly prosaic, a plain set of broad steps went down into shadows. Another roar, wordless and deep-throated, came echoing up from the gloom.
Kharn shook the thoughts away, walked forwards, and let the darkness fold over him as Dreagher swung the doors closed at his back.
KHARN CAME DOWN the broad, shallow steps into the great space that had been built into the ship as Angron’s triumphal hall. He had been in it many times but it was a different space now, even with most of it lost in the dark. It felt different. Kharn registered that sensation, of walking into a strange space unfamiliar to him, and wondered if any room that held a primarch could feel the same again.
He walked three slow, measured paces onto the smooth stone chamber floor, and pushed his enhanced vision through its darkness adjustments – the primarch had shattered most of the lights, or torn them from their mountings. Here and there the survivors cast glow-pools that did little more than texture the darkness around them. Some of the glows showed dark spatters and puddles across the floor, but Kharn did not bother to look closely. Even if the smell of it were not drowning his senses, he had seen the aftermath of death too many times not to know it.