by Dan Abnett
Which meant he had three choices: abort and get out, use her cruelly, or bring her in on the truth.
‘I can’t hide you much longer, Kon,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Why don’t you go to the Lord Commander?’
‘I can’t.’
‘When are you going to tell me what this is about?’ Rukhsana asked.
Grammaticus rose to his feet, stared at her, and carefully considered his choices.
SIX
Mon Lo Harbour, Nurth, the next day
THE SKY WAS sapphire, the dusty earth cinnamon. Under the alien sun, the expedition’s Imperial Army forces formed a corridor. To one side, the Geno Chiliad, the Zanzibari Hort; to the other, the Outremars, the Sixth Torrent, the Thorns. Ranks of armoured warriors stood ready, ninety deep, their banners and standards fluttering in the wind. Battle tanks and armoured speeders elevated their weapon mounts in salute. Horns bawled into the morning. Kettle drums clattered incessantly. Amon Jeveth’s Titans formed a towering backdrop, backlit by the scalding Nurthene sun.
Overhead, the slow skies turned. The wind made a reptilian hiss, and the noise of the drums almost drowned out the sounds of screaming coming from the city ten kilometres away.
Namatjira was wearing gold plate armour, with a fan of ostrich feathers around his head, and a ten-metre cape of peacock eyes held out behind him by his slaves. Liquid gold had been delicately painted onto his face by his cosmeticians, and it had dried to form a tissue-thin mask. He held a silver Mughal mace in one hand, the sunlight glinting off its many jewels, and a golden ritual saintie in the other. The torso of his armour was engineered with two extra pairs of cybernetic limbs, and these spread to clutch a pair of daggers and a pair of sabres. Six arms extended, Namatjira resembled the death goddess of ancient Sind myth.
The Lucifer Black companions surrounded him, swords drawn, holding stiff, ritual poses of defence. The thylacene lay at Namatjira’s feet in the dust, licking its coat. A marsupial tiger from Taprobane, it was one of the many lost species back-ginered from DNA samples during the Unification Era. Namatjira’s pet was called Serendip. It gazed out at the day’s heat with hooded, disinterested eyes.
Major General Dev stood at Namatjira’s right hand in bronze battle armour, his durband crimson and his spiked helm silver. Dev carried a gurz and a long-handled sword. Next to him stood Lord Wilde of the Torrent, his platinum wargear glittering with rubies and emeralds. Lord Wilde’s augmetic eyes were glowing green slits in his white ceramic face mask. He personally carried the vexil-standard of the Torrent, a four-metre golden pole surmounted with a diamond-checked tail and the gilt crest of the Pontus Euxinus. Third in line was General Karsh of the Regnault Thorns, his ritual chrome armour so thwart with spikes and recurve barbs that he seemed more the embodiment of a vicious trap than a person.
To Namatjira’s left stood Khedive Ismail Sherard of the Outremars, a congenital dwarf dressed in graphite grey robes and a brow-circlet of titanium. His stature belied his level of influence in the Army and the hierarchies of Terra. Though the Outremars had supplied just five thousand foot soldiers to Namatjira’s expedition, far fewer than the Chiliad, the Torrent or the Thorns, they were the backbone of the Imperial Army, accounting for almost seven per cent of the Army’s overall numbers.
Outremar troops served in almost all expeditions and martial hosts, and their khedives, all dwarfs of the same blood dynasty as Sherard, were famed for their tactical insight and discipline. The Grand Khedive, Sherard’s great uncle, was one of the Emperor’s foremost advisors and confidants. Khedive Sherard stood on a small grav disk, suspended half a metre above the sand. The train of his grey robe, cut with a batwing edge, was held out behind him by eunuchoid slaves, each slave pulling taut a point of the batwing so that it seemed as if Sherard was spreading great pinions to ascend into the sky.
Beside him stood Sri Vedt, who held the rank of Uxor Primus of the Geno Five-Two units attached to the expedition. She was sheathed in a red burqua, and escorted by thirteen of her most senior uxors, including Honen Mu and Rukhsana Saiid.
Forty burnished servitors held long poles supporting billowing white canopies above the expedition commanders, shielding them from the sun’s bite.
A transatmospheric craft slid down out of the blue, roared over the assembled multitude, and settled with a whine of dampers at the end of the long troop corridor. The drums stopped playing. The horns stopped braying. There was silence apart from the crack of the canopy sheets and the distant screaming of Mon Lo.
A figure emerged from the craft and began to walk down the corridor towards the waiting commanders.
Namatjira nodded and, as one, the vast host of men dropped to their knees. Banners, flags and standards sloped forwards in deference.
The lone figure came closer, trudging down the sand of the corridor, nodding in respect to the men bowed down on either side of him.
The figure wore silver-edged purple power armour. He was fully a third taller than the tallest geno warrior in the muster.
There was an awed hush. It took almost eight minutes for the Astartes to walk down the entire corridor to Namatjira. In that eternity, the only things that moved were the wind-caught banners, the slow-turning clouds, and the Astartes himself.
Ten metres short of Namatjira and his commanders, the Astartes stopped. Slowly and deliberately, he removed his left gauntlet and dropped it onto the hot sand. Then he unlocked his helm, drew it up over his face, and dropped that as well. His head, revealed, was noble: hairless, powerful, copper-skinned. His eyes were as bright as the sapphire sky.
He drew his gladius with his right hand, and sliced its edge across the palm of his bared left hand. Tossing the short sword aside, he knelt, holding out his left hand to Namatjira. Blood dripped from the deep palm wound onto the sand.
‘Respected lord,’ he said, his head on his chest, ‘worthy and appointed master of the Six Hundred and Seventieth Expedition, I pledge my forces and my allegiance to you, recognising you as the proxy of our beloved Emperor in this theatre. It is my honour to add the Alpha Legion’s strength to your fighting force. United, may we annihilate our common foe. To this end, I offer tribute in blood.’
Namatjira spread all six of his arms and allowed the Lucifers to take his weapons from him. One of them also removed the golden glove sheathing Namatjira’s real left hand. Namatjira stepped forwards, his slaves releasing his long cape of peacock eyes so that it floated out behind him on the breeze. He stroked his bare left hand down one of the spikes of Karsh’s armour, then held it out, dripping, to meet the proffered hand of the kneeling Astartes.
Their bloody palms pressed together and gripped tightly.
‘I receive your tribute,’ Namatjira replied, ‘and respond with my own blood. The expedition rejoices that you have joined us. Welcome. I am Namatjira and this is my pledge. For the Emperor.’
The hands parted. The Astartes rose to his feet. He towered over the Lord Commander.
‘I am Alpharius. For the Emperor, my lord.’
‘REALLY? ARE YOU?’ Grammaticus murmured to himself. Two kilometres away, he was observing the great meeting through a high-power scope from the flat roof of the terracotta palace’s kitchen block. He kept low, carefully avoiding the eyesight range of the palace sentries, the jamming module attached to his belt non-invasively blocking the field sensors and the stationed gun servitors.
His scope was a quality piece, an eldar long-gun sight, another gift from the Cabal. It resonated the images back into his eye, almost as though he was standing at Namatjira’s shoulder.
He could not hear their words from that distance, of course, but he read lips as well as any high-function logokine.
I am Alpharius. For the Emperor, my lord.
Grammaticus’s perception was so acute and specialised that he could even lip-read accents. ‘Alpharius’ was speaking in common Low Gothic, with a rising spur on the middle syllables of Alpharius and Emperor that hinted at a Gedrosian or Cyr
enaican basal slant. But the cursal lip motions suggested something akin to Mars hivecant, or even Odrometiccan.
The Cabal had briefed him well, but the problem was that virtually nothing was known about the Last Primarch. Unlike all the other primarchs, Alpharius had never publicly identified his homeworld. Furthermore, no definitive portraits of him were extant. The Cabal had procured many images, but they were clearly contradictory. It was as if Alpharius had many heads.
The face Grammaticus was watching through the powerful viewer agreed, at least, with a few of the historical portraits. There was a certain likeness in the cast of features to both Horus Lupercal and the face the Emperor wore, which made sense if the gene-legacy theory was true.
Even from a distance, Grammaticus could accurately gauge height and mass. The being he was observing was substantially larger than either Herzog or Pech, the bona fide Alphas Grammaticus had encountered in Mon Lo.
Maybe, maybe this was the genuine article. The thought of Mon Lo washed angst back into him, unbidden. His hands began to fidget and shake. The dragon had been in his mind, and in his dreams, ever since his escape. Of course, he wasn’t afraid of it because it was a dragon or, at least, he was no more afraid of dragons than any rational human being might be. The real, deep fear that chilled his soul was knowing what the dragon represented.
He dulled his mind as he felt another psychic pass. Shere was still alive, out there, scanning for him from time to time like a passing spy drone. Grammaticus curled his mind away like an armadillo every time one of Shere’s probes came close.
The sun beat down. In the distance, he could hear the screaming. This was no life for a thousand year-old man. Grammaticus was beginning to think he had been a fool to accept the Cabal’s gift of reincarnation. He began to wish, honestly and absolutely, that his first death had been his only death.
I wish you’d left me there, bleeding out on the asphalt at Anatol Hive. Why did you bring me back, and sleeve me in new flesh? Why? For this?
The Cabal made no answer. They had made no approach to him at all since his return from Mon Lo. From the moment he’d stolen his way back into Uxor Rukhsana’s quarters, he’d spent hours gazing into mirrors and dishes of water, waiting for Gahet, or one of the others, to contact him via fleet conduit.
They had not come to him.
My life has been long, he considered, but it is too short for this.
He trained the scope back towards the distant meeting.
SILENT IN THE hard sunlight, Dinas Chayne scaled the terracotta wall and slipped his black armoured form over the parapet onto the roof of the kitchen block. The most recent sensor sweep of the area had picked something up. Or rather, it hadn’t.
There are shadows in our shadows, sir. He remembered his own words.
Chayne had been on his way to search Uxor Rukhsana’s quarters while she was out attending the great meeting when the security post had flagged the anomaly. The sensor sweep had revealed a vague blank on the roof of the kitchen block, a dead spot that the sensors seemed unable to read or probe. The adepts manning the security post had dismissed it as an imaging artefact, but Chayne had not been so quick to judge. In his opinion, the reading suggested someone or something well-veiled, a presence announced by its very absence.
Dinas Chayne was a wary man. He had been a soldier longer than he had been an adult. Born on Zous, one of Terra’s myriad lost colonies, a planet that had been locked in a brutal global war for almost a century, Chayne had grown up on the losing side. Its economy bankrupted by the war effort, its industry shattered by saturation bombing, its menfolk decimated, his birth-nation had begun to turn, in desperation, to its remaining assets. It conscripted its womenfolk and its children. Aged eleven, Chayne had found himself wearing the uniform of the National Youth, carrying an autorifle, and en route to a border outpost to fight. The youngest soldier in his company had been seven. The troop leader had been a boy of fourteen.
They had held the outpost for twenty-six months. The troop leader had been killed after three weeks, two days shy of his fifteenth birthday. Perhaps seeing something only children could see, the troop turned to Chayne for leadership. Barely twelve years old, Chayne had taken command. By the time he turned thirteen, he had killed sixteen men in open combat, and was a hardened, emotionally extinct veteran of that hopeless conflict.
Then the fleet of the Imperial expedition had arrived in close orbit. The war was crushed out in six days, and Zous itself brought to compliance in six weeks. It was one of Namatjira’s earliest actions. The brutalised child soldiers were gradually rounded up during the subsequent cleansing campaign, and the fiercest of them paraded before Namatjira for his amusement.
The Lord Commander had always said that there had been something in Chayne’s face that had marked him out from the other pugnacious, filthy war-urchins. Dinas Chayne wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he had been placed in the ward of a Lucifer Black officer, to be raised as his surrogate son.
Aged eighteen, Chayne had joined the Lucifers. Twenty years later, he served as the bajolur of Namatjira’s companion bodyguard, and was one of the most decorated and respected warriors in the regiment.
Namatjira had a good eye for natural born warriors.
Chayne crouched low, drawing his short, curved sword of folded Toledo steel. The palace sensors were feeding directly into his visor, conjuring subtle green tactical displays in front of his eyes. There was the blank, the absence. Twenty metres left, at the rim of the roof.
He coiled like a cat, and pounced. The rim of the roof was vacant. There was no one there. Nothing.
No, not nothing. On the low parapet, there was a scrap of paper, held down by a small white stone. The scrap read: Better luck next time.
‘HEY, WE’RE MISSING everything,’ said Lon, nudging him.
Soneka woke. ‘What?’
‘We’re late. It’s started. We should get out there, het. The regiments have assembled to greet the Astartes.’
Soneka sat up. He was in the hospital wing of the terracotta palace, where he’d taken a cot to be with the last of his men, the last ten Dancers. The wing was sweltering hot and smelled of stale urine.
‘You all right, het?’ asked Shah.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘We may not be a company any more,’ said Lon, ‘but I say we go out there and stand in the line like men. Like Dancers.’
‘Yeah!’ agreed Gin.
‘You got the flag?’ asked Lon.
Shah nodded. He’d been carrying the Dancers’ tattered standard like a bedroll since Visages.
‘Good,’ said Lon. ‘Let’s go. You coming, het?’
Soneka was busy getting dressed. He was sweating. He couldn’t find his socks.
‘Yes, I’m coming, all right?’
‘The Astartes have already landed,’ said Sallom, gazing out of the chamber window. ‘Hell, there’s an awful lot of flag waving and how d’ye do going on out there.’
‘Well, it’s Astartes, isn’t it?’ said Shah. ‘What do you expect?’
Soneka reached his good hand under his stained pillow in search of his socks. His fingers struck something hard.
‘Did one of you put this here?’ he asked. ‘Put what where?’ asked Lon.
Soneka held up a small, diorite head, one of the many hundreds of thousands that had given Visages its name.
The last of the Dancers all shrugged. ‘Must have been me, then,’ Soneka decided.
HE ALREADY REGRETTED the note. The note had been stupid. Cocky. Yes, cocky was the word. Gahet had forever been reproving Grammaticus for his arrogance and his over-confidence in his logokine powers. A Cabal agent should never bait the killers stalking him, especially if those killers were good at their job. Grammaticus knew enough about the Lucifer Blacks to realise they were terribly good at their job. He’d been a fool to taunt them like that. What had he been thinking?
That I’m immortal and nothing can kill me? Mon Lo had shown him how spurious that assumption wa
s. You just can’t resist it, can you, John? That’s all it is. You can’t resist showing off?
They’re not that good, Grammaticus thought. Not compared to me.
‘You can’t come in,’ the aide was insisting. ‘Uxor Rukhsana is away at the Grand Welcome. Her quarters are private.’
Grammaticus stepped back into the shadows of the colonnade and listened. He had been slipping his way back to the sanctuary of Rukhsana’s private quarters, the only place he felt safe. The palace was quiet, with almost everyone outside for the arrival of the Alpha Legion. Coming back along the hallway, he’d heard the voices ahead.
Three cowled and robed men stood at the door of Rukhsana’s quarters, confronting the aide. Their leader was saying, ‘You don’t understand, aide. I am Tinkas, surveyor of fabric for the expedition fleet. It’s my duty to systematically assess and evaluate all properties captured or commandeered by the expedition. I am in the process of surveying this palace. The work must be done, by order of the Fleet Master.’
He showed the aide some kind of paperwork.
Don’t let them in, Tuvi, Grammaticus willed.
The girl wavered. ‘This really isn’t a good time, sir. My uxor’s privacy is—’
‘I simply need a moment to scan and assess. It’s quite un-invasive. A measurement or two. We’re not interested in the contents of the chambers. We will be discreet.’
Tuvi, they’re not who they say they are. Be cautious! I’ve met Tinkas, and he doesn’t wear a robe nor is he anywhere close to that height. You’re being deceived.
‘Well, I suppose,’ Tuvi said.
Damn it, Tuvi! Grammaticus began to move. As the hooded men shuffled into the uxor’s quarters past the aide, Grammaticus headed back down the colonnade and climbed out through the last archway. He clambered up onto the roof, and crossed the tiles, running low, heading for the far side of the block.