by Dan Abnett
‘South of Palatine Tower,’ said Piers. He had got off the carrier without a word to Hari. He stood, buttoning up his fly. He nodded his head. ‘That there, boy. Palatine Tower. Ten kilometres, maybe.’
Hari looked, but he couldn’t see anything except atmospheric murk.
Every part of him ached. Five hours of discomfort, sweltering airless heat, and being used as a bolster by a man twice his size.
‘How much longer?’ he asked.
Piers shrugged. He had put on his shako at an accidentally jaunty angle, and was carving slices off a foul-smelling cured sausage with his bayonet. Around them, troopers milled, stretched, pissed. One of the escort tanks grumbled past, kicking up dust.
‘Interesting that,’ remarked Piers, through a mouthful of sausage. ‘That thing what you were reading.’
Hari glared at him. The grenadier had been asleep for over four hours, the weight of his head never shifting from Hari’s shoulder.
‘Just resting my eyes, boy,’ Piers grinned. ‘You should be careful with that, though. A theist tract, eh? Get yourself into trouble. That stuff is banned, as contrary to the Imperial Truth. Could get yourself shot.’
‘I didn’t put it there,’ Hari said.
‘Will not stand up in court,’ Piers replied. A fleck of sausage had got caught in the bristles of his moustache. He hacked off another slice, offered it to Hari on the tip of his blade.
Hari shook his head.
‘Actually’, Hari said, ‘it’s not banned. The preaching of it is banned, but the belief itself is tolerated.’
‘You a believer, then, boy?’ asked Piers, his cheeks stuffed with sausage.
‘No,’ said Hari. He’d read the file through twice since he’d found it. It appeared to be a copy of the so-called Lectitio Divinitatus. He had no way of telling if it was complete, or what complete even meant. He wondered how it had found its way onto his slate. His first thought had been Sindermann, but that seemed unlikely. Sindermann would have just given it to him, and asked for opinions. Hari wondered about the woman in the Blackstone. Keeler. She’d taken his slate from him. Had she secretly loaded a copy? Perhaps from a data-storage ring hidden under those mittens? Prisoners smuggled things into their isolation, especially items dear to them. If it had been her, why had she done it?
‘Are you?’ Hari asked.
Piers stopped chewing, and swallowed. He wiped his mouth ‘A believer?’ he asked. That’s a question and a half. Do I believe He’s a god? The god? I don’t know what any of that means. Is He high above us all, a Master of Mankind, divine in His grace? Well, I have to believe so. Otherwise, what’s the point of any of this?’
‘Is He not just-‘ Hari began.
‘What? What is He?’ Piers asked. He sat down on a block of rubble, eased off one boot, and tipped grit out of it. His thick, dirty toes stuck out through holes in what once had been socks.
‘I’m from the Uplands, I am,’ he said. ‘Born and raised. Upland Tercio, hooo! There’s faith up there still. In a lot of places. Don’t give me that eye, boy. You know it. People have to believe, it’s wired into them. They need it, that’s my slant on the matter.’
‘They need it?’
The grenadier nodded, and began to make a clumsy effort to get his boot back on.
‘We’ve always needed something,’ he said. ‘Deep down. You do. I do. Everyone. The faiths, the old religions of the back-then days, they’re all gone. Erased. They was a crutch, so it’s been said, we didn’t need. They was holding us back from our potential as a species.’
Hari raised the slate and wrote that down.
‘You like that, eh?’ asked Piers. ‘You like that, do you? I read that in a book once. Don’t look surprised, boy, you know I can read. I was doing it over your shoulder.’
‘So, faith persists?’ asked Hari.
Piers nodded. ‘It’s a part of us we don’t let go. We need it, I think, like air. Like food. Look at us here. Would we be doing this, any of us, if we didn’t have faith in something bigger than us? Something bigger, with a plan for us?’
‘We had orders’ said Hari.
‘You didn’t.’
Hari sighed.
‘In the Grenadiers, when I joined up,’ Piers said, ‘we had a confraternity. Just private, unofficial.’
‘Like a warrior lodge?’
‘No!’ Piers snapped. ‘Not like that Astartes bullshit. Just an association. We offered thanks, for surviving battles and such, to Mythrus. Some way she was a god. From a long, long time ago. A god who watched over warriors.’
‘She?’
‘I called her she. I call my weapon she.’ Piers patted the heavy caliver leaning against the rubble beside him. ‘I believe in Old Bess before anything else. Gender’s not the point here-‘
‘Gender is fluid?’
‘Shit,’ Piers groaned, and shook his head wearily. ‘Let’s stick to one matter at a time. Your mind’s everywhere. Mythrus looked after us. I don’t know if she was a god, or used to be a god, or what. I don’t know if any of us even really thought she was a god. But it made us feel better. A little faith, see? To keep us warm through a cold night in the trench, to keep us safe in a firefight.’
‘Two minutes!’ an officer yelled out from behind them. Piers got his boot back on.
‘Gods come and go,’ said Piers. ‘Religions, creeds, they come and go. Sometimes they die out. Sometimes they fade, or get suppressed. Sometimes they lose their identity, or we forget about them. But they linger, that’s what I think. They remain, under the surface. They are there, for when we need them again. So sometimes, they come back. They might have old names, like my girl Mythrus. They might take new ones. The creeds don’t matter, see? That’s just dressing, ritual palaver. The need in us, that’s what counts. The Emperor, is He a god? I don’t know. Maybe we’re making Him into one. Maybe He’s become one along the way. Or maybe we’re mistaking Him for one. Does that matter? Or perhaps, just saying, He was a god all along, and we’re only just realising it.’
‘You think that?’ asked Hari.
Piers raised his hands.
‘I’m not coming down on any side of it,’ he said. ‘I’m just suggesting that it’s us. We need something. Need something to believe in. He’s either truly that thing, or-‘
‘Or?’
‘Or He’ll do, boy. We look around, and He’s the obvious choice. The only choice. He fills our need, see? He’s the new name we’ve latched onto to keep us strong. He’s god, by default. We need Him to be, or all of this is mass insanity.’
The officers were calling again. Troops were trudging back to the carriers, complaining.
‘Are you lying again?’ asked Hari.
‘Yes,’ Piers grinned. ‘Or was that a lie too?’ He got up, stretched robustly and gleefully ripped the loudest, longest fart Hari had ever heard.
‘Better out than in,’ he declared.
‘Better out here than in there,’ said Hari.
* * *
The hatches slammed. The vibrations resumed. They began to roll. Piers filled the seat next to him, lolled, and was soon resting the dead weight of his head on Hari’s shoulder. Hari held the slate, hunched up, and began to read through the file again.
He could see Piers’ reflection in the glow of the small screen.
His eyes open.
* * *
Corbenic Card had fallen on the eighteenth of Secundus. Fallen easily, brutally. The first of the bastions that protected the approaches to the Lion’s Gate, proud and haughty, it was gone, its defenders put to the sword, Now it formed a vantage from which to oversee the mass assault on the Colossi Gate, a far greater prize.
Corbenic’s fabric had been shattered. Its walls were split, and barely any of the roofs remained. Dust was everywhere, dust like chalk powder. It coated every surface, and drifted in the air. The light was sallow. From the broken ramparts, Ahriman watched the advances below: tides of infantry, of war machines
, rolling past the ruins of Corbenic like the delta of a vast, black river, flowing from its source to the north, at the Lion’s Gate space port, then down the floodplain of the broken Palace to encircle Colossi.
Ground attack craft flew past, heavy and fat, droning and glinting like blowflies. Eighty, then another eighty, growling south at low level.
‘I undestand the Great Khan has already presented his credentials,’ Ahriman remarked.
Mortarion slowly torned his immense frame from the rampart’s splintered edge, and glowered at Ahriman. The white dust caked Mortanion’s armour and his face like the dry clay of a tomb. He had rested his scythe against the cracked wall nearby, but Ahriman knew the huge weapon could be in the Pale King’s hands, and striking in a nanosecond.
‘Goading me is not advisable,’ Mortarion said.
‘Not a goad,’ Ahzek Ahriman replied, though it had been. The scythe, named Silence, was preposterously huge, even by the theatrical standards of the Legiones Astartes warrior-kind. Ahriman wondered if Mortarion would ever understand what true strength was, the strength they had come to be blessed with. Under the drape of his cloak, Ahriman’s hands were empty, but just as ready as the Pale King’s blade. The idea of pushing the spectral prince was tempting but this was not the moment. ‘Not a goad at all,’ Ahriman repealed ‘An observation.’
‘Hmm.’ The primarch-lord of the XIV Legion grunted, then sneered. ‘Yes, he’s there. Jaghatai. He has tested my line, the usual show. A mere sortie. This will see an end of it, though. These next few days.’
‘Of the war, my lord?’
‘What? Yes, that too.’
Ahriman knew where the Pale King’s focus lay. Mortarion despised almost everything, but the war had bred in him a particular animus with the Khan and his Scar-brood, and that had festered into a complex obsession, a battle too long unfinished. It was useful to harness that, to keep the Pale King’s eyes on a singular goal and prevent him from lashing out at those around him, most of whom he reviled.
Like the Thousand Sons. Their battlefield alliance, Death Guard and Thousand Sons, so ordained by the Lord of Iron, would inevitably be a difficult thing to manage.
‘Ah,’ said Ahriman. ‘You mean, specifically-‘
‘Of course I do,’ murmured Mortarion. ‘Let them laugh, let them try to laugh, as my blades cleave their faces. They have lasted this long only by running from me. There is nowhere left to run.’
‘I’m sure your victory will be severe, lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘But I urge you, the Great Khan’s warriors have more talents than mere speed of mobility They don’t have our numbers. Your numbers. But they have always displayed great merit in warfare…’
‘Urge me not, Ahriman,’ said Mortarion. ‘I seek no advice from witches.’
‘Yet here we are,’ said Ahriman.
‘We are,’ the primarch replied. ‘Where is he?’
‘Approaching, lord. Be patient.’
‘That’s twice you’ve told me what to do,’ said the Pale King. ‘There won’t be a third time.’
‘Understood,’ said Ahriman. Mortarion turned back to the wall. Ahriman saw him wince. He could taste the suffering in him. He could smell it. A pestilential stench leaked from the Death Lord’s armour. Flies buzzed around the seams and joints of his panoply. He was decaying inside, and would decay forever. The torment was unimaginable. It was extraordinary that anyone, even a being as insanely as Mortarion, could endure it and remain standing.
We all get our gifts, Ahriman thought, each one tailored to our needs by the Great Ocean, all ruinous, in their way, but some more callous that others. I am whole, at least. Blessed with exquisite wonder. Gifted beyond measure.
Ahriman raised his left hand, his iridescent robe parting like mist. He let the motes of dust that thickened the air around them fall on his open palm the dust of Terra. The home world. From which we came, and to which we now return. And all will be dust in our triumph.
The Crimson King had sent Ahriman ahead of him to Corbenic Gard to gauge Mortarion’s present demeanour. Though now riddled with it himself, the Pale King still deplored warp-craft and witchery a blight he considered personified by the Thousand Sons. It was utter hypocrisy, of course. Mortarion had swum deep in the same intoxicating Ocean was like an addict… no, an inebriate. A rabid advocate of strict temperance who had then fallen to drink, who then raged for weeks at a time in drunken excess, only to hate himself when the bout was done, and swear never to touch another drop again, until the next relapse came.
Pitiful. To obtain such gifts and not appreciate them. Mortarion’s tragedy was that he had become what he had spent his life opposing. He hated himself. He could not reconcile his own drastic transmutation in his mind. The pestilential stench seeping from his plate was, as much as anything, shame.
For our part, thought Ahriman, you are the enemy, Pale King. How ironic you are content to be known by that title now, the name of the very monsters you used to hunt with such glee. Mortarion, witch-burner, purger of wisdom. Louder than any other voice, yours was raised against our being from the very start. There were other accusers too: Dorn, Russ, Corax, Manus, but none as loud or as self-righteous as you. Because of you, Prospero burned and Tizca fell. Russ was the implement, and dread Horus the architect, but you were the instigator who fomented the prejudice to begin with. We have longed to see you punished for that, and this is sweet indeed. Look what has become of you: Manus is long dead; Corax and Russ are broken, and lost from the field of war; Dorn is cornered and sweating out his last hours in a prison of his own making as oblivion descends.
But you. You couldn’t even cling on to your principles, unlike them. You, the loudest critic of all, have become one with us. Your strength counted for nothing. You have submitted to the warp, and you loathe yourself for doing so. And we can now watch with relish as you rot and hate yourself for ever.
Behind his gold-and-azure mask, Ahzek Ahriman smiled. Placing the main strengths of the Thousand Sons and Death Guard Legions side by side in the same formation had seemed an insensitive decision, typical of the Lord of Iron’s blunt and tone-deaf paradigms. This great siege was Perturabo’s to orchestrate. He expected his ally lords to set aside their differences and work together without complaint.
Of course, the Lord of Iron had not made that decision, though he thought he had. With a deft twitch of his fingers and a touch of his mind, Ahriman had adjusted Perturabo’s precious and detailed mental scheme at their last meeting without the Lord of Iron even knowing it.
Despite the presence of the Death Guard, the Thousand Sons had chosen to fight here.
‘Do you hear voices?’ Mortarion asked, without looking around.
‘No.’ Ahriman lied.
‘I keep hearing voices,’ said Mortarion.
‘Just the wind,’ said Ahriman.
‘In my sleep?’
‘Do you sleep, lord?’ Ahriman asked gently.
‘No,’ Mortarion admitted.
The voices were there. Ahriman could hear them all. The Neverborn were gathering to the north, building like a storm at his back, seeping under the telaethesic ward where it had fractured at the port, and manifesting to advance.
He could hear their voices. It was not his turn to answer them yet. He longed to shackle them and wrench their secrets from them, There would be time for that, when the war was done. For now, they were malformed, new-fleshed, learning to live and move in realspace. Some, like old Samus, chattered incessantly, repeating his dirge over and again: ‘That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’ Others, like Balphagora and Ka’Bandha, Sahrakoor Elekh and Amnaich, spoke in tongues Ahriman had yet to master. Some sang. Some mewled like abandoned infants. Some, like Ku’Gath and Rotigus and Scabeiathrax, made the whirring drone of insect plagues or the infrasonic croak of frogs N’Kari and Orbonzal and a thousand othe
rs gibbered, issuing noises of inhuman pain, of despair, of glee, of anger, of hunger. Inarticulate sounds. They had yet to find their languages.
A million immortal voices. A million million. One rose from the cacophony, quiet and clear.
Is he prepared?
He is, my king,+ willed Ahriman. +As much as he ever will be.+
I approach.
The air writhed open. The motes of dust swirled, flurried, and swam together, forming a great, pointed archway that looked as though it had been fused from calcified bone. Cold light burned through the arch.
Mortarion turned, raising his hand to shield his eyes against the glare. Ahriman bowed.
The light shafting through the skeletal arch dimmed, sucking back like a tide to be absorbed into the figure that stepped out. The arch cooled, blistered, turned to vitreous stone, then flaked and blew away into the air like ash.
The Crimson King had arrived. Ahriman could not look upon him His glory was too raw and bright.
‘You are late,’ said Mortarion.
‘My brother,’ said Magnus. His radiance dulled. Just as he had chosen the magnificence of his arrival to establish unequivocal power, now he selected his form carefully: a human face, one eye socket simply empty; a helm of wide, downturned ivory tusks to subliminally suggest deference; a modest scale, gigantic still, but deftly measured to be slightly shorter and slighter than the towering shape of the Death Lord; plain plate. Even the billowing silk over-robes were demure and unpatterned, to indicate submission.
‘I am glad to see you, and to stand with you,’ said Magnus.
Mortarion glared. Ahriman rose again, watching, delighting in the Pale King’s discomposure.
‘I…’ Mortarion began.
‘Be at ease,’ said Magnus. ‘Please. We are both yoked under instruction from our brother Perturabo. We are to abide by his plan. I would not have chosen to discomfort either of us by standing shoulder to shoulder with you. The Zone Imperialis is big, with many, varied theatres. But still, who am I to question the Lord of Iron’s intricate scheme of war?’