by Marc
Nathan hurled himself aside and brought up the halberd to block the slash. It was a mistake. The power of the blow threw him back, jolting his arms as the shrieking teeth of the saw tore chunks from the halberd’s steel haft in a shower of sparks. The giant wielded its huge blade with ease, and in the blink of an eye its shrieking blade circled and swept down at him again. Nathan leapt back but the sweep of the chainsword tore the head from the halberd and slid along the arm of his suit, chewing through it and tearing at his flesh. A cold flush of painlessness told Nathan that the injury was severe; his body was already trying to shut out the agony.
In desperation Nathan thrust the jagged end of the halberd haft into the thing’s barrel chest. It rang off an armoured plate and buried itself deep in a nest of cables beneath where its ribs should have been. The giant warrior didn’t even flinch as it sent him sprawling with a blow from its heavy pistol.
Death was close. One of his eyes was blind and Nathan felt an abnormal calm as he accepted that these were his last seconds of life. The world seemed to slow to an insect crawl as the armoured warrior stepped towards him, raising its keening sword for a killing blow. Nathan felt only a pang of disappointment that he would never know more of Kron’s strange wisdom; so much must have died with him. The pounding of Nathan’s last heartbeats sounded like a distantly thumping drum.
Thump. One armoured boot crunched down. Flecks of blood span away from the motion-captured teeth of the chainsword as it soared upward. Nathan looked down at his right arm and saw it was crimson from shoulder to wrist. Everything wavered as he started to black out.
Thump. The other boot crashed down. The blade was raised almost to the top of its arc. Nathan was aware of movement where Kron had fallen, and a tiny spark of hope flared that he might still be alive, might save Nathan somehow if only he were quick and could defeat this unstoppable colossus. Logic sneered at his paltry hopes from the dark recesses of his brain.
Thump. The blade began to sweep down, gathering momentum. Nathan’s world was shrinking, the vision from his remaining eye darkening until he could barely see. Paltry hopes and all conscious thought were corroded away by the sea of agony raging through his arm.
Thump. Nathan saw the blade had entered his dimmed world and part of him welcomed it, teeth flashing bright as a shark’s hungry smile in the gloom. The pain would be over soon, that could only be good. A spectral hand seemed to reaching over him to touch the blade, as if the God-Emperor himself were placing a benediction on his slaughter. The hand was crawling with blue fires and sparks cascaded from its fingertips.
Thump. A flash of light leapt from hand to blade, and with it the chainsword exploded and was hurled away from the giant’s fist. The hulking warrior staggered and started to raise his pistol. Kron stepped forward into Nathan’s circle of vision and raised a hand.
Thump. A ravening bolt of brilliance crackled from Kron’s hand onto the warrior’s chest plate and rent it asunder in a thunderclap. The mighty figure was thrown off its feet, its pistol sending explosive rounds flashing off wildly from its owner’s convulsing death-spasm.
Thump. The chainsword, molten and twisted rang down on the deck-plates. Nathan clasped his left arm to his right shoulder and instantly felt warmth flood through his blood slick wounds. The armoured warrior crashed to the deck beside its smoking sword. Nathan tried to breathe more deeply to clear his head but found he couldn’t. The orange flames all around were shrinking into bluish flickers. The air was nearly gone.
Kron squatted down beside him as the ship shook, as if from some internal explosion. Nathan could see the chest of Kron’s suit was shredded and bloody, a death-shot surely. Wreckage dislodged by the shockwave crashed down nearby with horrible clangour. Kron didn’t even flinch as he calmly removed his helmet. As the helmet came away, Kron’s eye blazed as never before. It was glowing with the fierce light of furnace. Nathan tried to blot out the horrible intensity of that glare in his dimmed world but couldn’t. It bored into him, so that it seemed like Kron the man was shrunk to nothing more than a wraith, that the crimson brilliance trailed behind it like smoke.
Kron’s lips moved, but Nathan had to strain to hear their faint whisper through the rarefied air.
‘Don’t you worry, shipmate, Kron’ll see to ye.’
‘L-Luminen!’ Nathan gasped.
‘No,’ Kron whispered.
Nathan’s body was trembling uncontrollably as shock set in. His vision had almost dimmed completely, apart from a harsh, red light floating nearby.
‘Not that at all.’
A helmet clamped down over Nathan’s head, dimming the light and bringing a welcome darkness.
NATHAN AWOKE ON the floor of the hidden cutter. His arm was in a sling and a bandage covered one of his eyes but he otherwise felt rested and healthy. Kron was sitting in one of the narrow pews, watching him.
‘How de ye feel?’ he inquired with genuine concern.
‘Good.’ Nathan grunted as he sat up. ‘How long was I out?’
‘Five hours. I took time to fix ye up, an’ me too, and rest some ‘fore we go back up to the gunroom.’
Nathan felt a sense of relief. He had feared Kron would ask him if he wanted to jump ship. The aftermath of a battle offered the best chance Nathan would likely get for an escape to go unnoticed. But somehow the prospect seemed a lot less appealing now he had seen what was out there waiting for mutineers and faithless men to fall into its clutches. In fact Nathan was feeling an unfamiliar amount of regard for the God-Emperor after his experiences, a craving for the protection the Ecclesiarchs promised could be gained from the blessings of the Holy Master of Mankind.
But that left him in here with Kron, not-a-Luminen Kron who could defeat a champion of the mad gods with his own lightning. No ordinary gunner, for sure. A servant of the Emperor? Somehow Nathan didn’t think so. If anything he really did look like a gargoyle in this setting, a red-eyed piece of malevolence that had detached itself from the stonework and come down to blaspheme among it. Perhaps someone hiding out then, disguised among a faceless mass yet always moving from one world to another. It would be a superb cover. Unremarkable, beneath attention and yet guarded by the awesome might of an Imperial warship. Ultimately, whatever other misgivings Nathan might have, Kron had saved his life and that put him firmly in Kron’s debt. He began to say so but Kron waved his thanks away.
‘Don’t be too thankful, lad. I had to fix your eye with what was to hand down here. I’m ‘fraid I might have made a terrible job out of it. Take the bandage off. Tell me if ye can see.’
Nathan knew what was coming even before his fingers brushed cold steel around his eye. The lens of it was hard and slightly curved to the touch. He bore the metal-sealed scars of his first engagement as part of the Emperor’s Navy, but his vision was perfect. Nathan shuddered as he recalled Kron’s unnerving personality shift after the fight with Kendrikson, when he had seemed like a slave desperate to escape his inactive bionic eye.
‘Kron?’ Nathan began tentatively. ‘Who are you really?’
Kron chortled. ‘A princeling who was stolen by gypsies.’
‘Don’t start that again.’
Very well, I’ll put it this way, lad… Cross the stars and fight for glory…’
THE TOWER
CS Goto
THE NARROW, DARK corridor that led out of the ciphers’ bloc was filthy. Little piles of dust were pushed up against the walls, congealed into paste as they mixed with whatever liquid seeped down the damp stone. In front of each doorway along the length of the passage, Lexio could see wedges of floor swept clean by the outward-opening doors themselves, and orderly footprints left in the dust as the other ciphers had hurried off to their duties. The marks were in the same place every day, and Lexio had memorised them all – memory was his special skill, after all. Just from the marks on the floor, Lexio could tell whether anyone was sick, missing, or merely running late. Not that they ever were.
The menials in this quadrant of the tower alwa
ys started their day in the corridors immediately adjacent to the Hall of Historical Correction. It was the mysterious centre of their world – for they could never enter it – around which revolved an entire unexplored universe of passageways and chambers that they would never see. They would fuss and shuffle in their own special, inexplicable manner, working their way out from the great hall in concentric rings of meek bustle, never looking up from the dusty flagstones at their feet. By the end of their working day, they would have passed through the realms of the ordinates and prefects, and would have reached the habitation area of the ciphers, buried deep in the subterranean realms of the tower’s foundations, tucked under the rather decrepit western wing of the immense edifice. The menials themselves lived another two storeys down, in a sector of the tower that never got cleaned. The professional sanitisers of the legendary Tower of Idols lived in the dustiest, most squalid conditions imaginable.
The cleaning timetable had been designed to ensure that the most important parts of the tower got sanitised first. It would not do for the Historicus to arrive at the great hall in the morning only to find it covered in the layers of dust and industrial grime that quickly accumulated during the day and night in the sleepless tower. To permit such a thing would be tantamount to the most unimaginable heresy. In fact, in an effort to avoid insulting the greater agents of the Emperor, a junior ordinate had struck upon the idea of making the menials’ working day slightly longer than a calendar day. This had the advantage of making the menials think that they were always behind schedule, forcing them to work in relay teams so that one was always cleaning the corridors outside the Hall of Historical Correction before another had reached the ciphers’ bloc. The relay teams shared a single salary between them, and none would dare complain because of the tremendous honour accorded to them; menials were recruited from the population outside the tower and were the only non-hereditary members of the Administratum to be granted the title of adept. The ordinate responsible for this stroke of genius was destined for the ranks of the prefectus.
As he did every morning, Lexio shook his head and ran his delicate fingers through the cobwebs that had collected around the doorway to his hab-unit overnight. For some reason, despite the intricate genius of the cleaning routine, his doorway was perpetually filthy. He resented having to walk through the grime – he was a hereditary cipher, not some scurrying menial. But, like an obsessive compulsive, he ran his well-scrubbed fingers through the dirt every morning, collecting gloopy sediment under his nails, and cursed under his breath at the incompetence of the lowly, salaried workers: adepts, indeed.
Lifting his feet carefully into neat little steps, avoiding the cracks between the flagstones and deliberately treading into as many of the existing footprints as possible, Lexio made his way through the half-light of the corridor. He had done this so often that an onlooker would no longer think that he looked unnatural as he shortened and lengthened his stride to fall in with the patterns on the floor. Indeed, he didn’t even have to look down at his feet – he knew where all the markings were and could make this precise journey in pitch darkness if he had to; a four-dimensional map of the route between the ciphers’ bloc and the Hall of Historical Correction was etched indelibly into his memory. He knew exactly where to place his feet at any given time, in any given location along the way, depending on the esoteric vagaries of the menials’ routines and the movements of the other officials in the quadrant.
Of course, Lexio didn’t know that he knew the route in such intricate, perfect detail. He had simply repeated the journey so often that he no longer had to think about it. It had seeped into his muscle-memory, bypassing his cognitive faculties altogether. Indeed, on a traumatic occasion a number of years before, Lexio’s walk to work had been dramatically interrupted by the exhausted collapse of a menial in the passage way in front of him. The man had fallen off a ladder and broken his neck as he thudded into the stone floor before Lexio’s feet. Suddenly jolted out of his routine and unsure about which way to turn next, it had taken the cipher nearly half an hour to retrace his steps back to his hab-unit in order to start the journey again. He lived in mortal dread of this happening again.
It was one of the ironies of his vocation, reflected Lexio as he lapsed into reverie once more, letting his feet take him up the first flight of steps towards the cleaner air of the ordinates’ sector of the western wing itself, that he was fated to remember everything and yet have no conscious access to his memories. It was a unique skill, and one that was highly prized by the Administratum. The ciphers of the Tower of Idols were carefully selected from specific bloodlines, which were interbred under rigorously controlled conditions, and the special verbatimem talent was meticulously cultivated in dedicated academies. Tests were conducted each year. The traditional families would prepare their children for the tests for years before; fathers and grandfathers passed on the secret arts of self-hypnosis which enabled the child to memorise dictation without showing any knowledge of the message that they were carrying. Some families had been in service since the time of the Emperor himself, and they were exceedingly proud of their honourable lineage as Imperial adepts.
Lexio stopped abruptly and took one step back. He was not feeling very relaxed this morning, and he had already made a mistake – overshooting this leg of his journey by a full stride. Somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, a whispering voice started to chant his family’s memory mantra, calming his mind so that he would make no more mistakes of this nature in the day to come.
As he stepped back automatically and a heavy vehicle rumbled past his face without stopping, obliterating the footprints that he had erroneously left in the dust in front of him. As it did every morning, the vehicle carried the prefectus secondus on his way to the Hall of Historical Correction. Without giving the matter any thought at all, Lexio turned sharply and walked along the wide corridor in the wake of the prefectus, keeping his feet neatly in the track-marks of the vehicle.
This wide, low corridor connected the ordinates’ wing to the more elaborate sector inhabited by the prefects. It was wide enough for fifty ordinates to walk side by side in the busiest times of the day, but its ceiling was so low that any one of them could reach up and touch it if they cared to. Above the passageway was another, exactly the same. And above that was another. If he listened very hard, Lexio could hear the footfalls of the officials on other levels bustling through the wide corridors on their way to their stations. The sound formed part of the familiar background noise of the tower, and it reassured everyone that they had a special place in a huge, magnificent machine. Lexio, of course, hardly noticed it at all anymore. He simply knew what tone he should hear and what volume it should be at different times of the day. Today, it sounded perfect, which was a relief.
As the passageway ran through the prefects’ sector, getting closer and closer to the Hall of Historical Correction, it grew steadily more impressive. The ceiling started to withdraw into the heavens and pillars began to rise out of the ground to support the suggestion of vaulted details. By the time the corridor left the prefects’ realm and reached the edge of the Hitoricus’s district, it was more like a cathedral, with a great vaulted ceiling soaring into the invisible heights. But Lexio never looked up. Instead, he recognised this location by the increased traffic and by the sudden cleanliness of the floor – it was as though this end of the corridor was cleaned and polished constantly. Without thinking about it, Lexio could feel the tension drop out of his shoulders as his muscle-memory realised that he no longer had to be so careful about where he put his feet – there were no dusty footprints for him to follow here, only cracks to be avoided.
After two hundred and seventy-four steps, Lexio turned sharply to his right and ducked into a low, dark passage that sloped upwards towards the next level. This little tunnel was clearly never cleaned at all – presumably the Historicus never had cause to stoop into these service tunnels and thus the menials had no incentive to clean them – and the angled ground squelc
hed and slid slightly as Lexio’s feet compressed the accumulated grime. It was too dark for him to see where the cracks or other footprints were, and he had never been able to see the ground to learn their position, so he shuffled nervously and rapidly through the confined space, emerging into a gloriously lit hallway on the other side, after twenty-eight slippery steps. Pale morning sunlight streamed into the ornate, gothic space through giant circular windows that ran the entire length of the hallway, casting long shadows across the shiny white floor. Each window depicted a scene from the glorious history of the Imperium, beginning even before the Horus Heresy and reaching up to the present day with the last stained-glass image. Visitors to the Historical Correction Unit would walk along the resplendent timeline, over immaculately polished white marble, before reaching the great doors at the end of the hallway. The picture was certainly one of a heroic and sanitary Imperium.
Lexio’s walk changed slightly as he made his way down this impressive historical line. It was not that he was intimidated by the weight of history itself, since he never looked up at the icons emblazoned on the windows, nor even by the responsibilities that awaited him when he reached the great doors. Rather, he was conscious that his feet were dirty and that he would leave grimy footprints on the pristine marble. He lifted his feet high and only touched the balls of his feet to the ground with each step, keeping away from the cracks between the huge slabs of stone. According to his four-dimensional mental map, Lexio should have timed his arrival perfectly to coincide with the start of the next cleaning relay, so his footprints would be eradicated within fifteen minutes.