by Various
Thiel knows that such a debt could never be paid. It does not stop him from trying, though.
‘Is that why we still contest Calth, to send a message?’
Putting his palms flat on the desk, Guilliman narrows his eyes.
‘You and I adopt a different position on this matter, a fact well known to us both.’ He pauses to emphasise his impatience. ‘What is it you really want to ask me, Aeonid?’
Deception is not Thiel’s forte, so he opts for the truth.
‘Why am I here?’
‘Because I need your help with something.’
‘I am at your service, lord.’
Guilliman smiles again. It is warmer this time, but hides something deeper. To the primarch’s credit, he doesn’t wait long to reveal what it is. ‘Tell me, Sergeant Thiel, what are the “Red-Marked”?’
Thiel allows himself an indulgent grin. ‘Is that what they are calling us?’
‘Us? So you admit the existence of this group?’
‘I do. I formed them, my lord. Volunteers only, men who can be spared–’
‘Is it not my decision who can be spared, Aeonid?’
Thiel bows his head, but quickly raises it again. He does not wish to wallow long in contrition.
‘I saw what was necessary and acted.’
Guilliman tries but cannot fully mask the admiration he feels at his sergeant’s temerity. It is what makes Thiel such a singular warrior.
‘And what, in your eyes, is necessary?’
Thiel answers boldly. ‘The defence of our realm and borders. You said yourself, lord – you have enemies. I agree. They are hiding in the ruins of our former worlds. Some have vessels and gather in warbands. Left unchallenged, they will unite once more. The Red-Marked are dedicated to rooting out these renegades.’
Guilliman leans forwards. ‘Tell me about the Red-Marked, Aeonid. How do they operate?’
It is unusual to be questioned by someone who would normally provide the answers, to be pressed for knowledge by such a peerless leader and tactician.
Nevertheless, Thiel answers.
‘Smaller divisions. Two or three squads, sometimes fewer.’
‘It is faster that way? Deployment, reactivity?’
‘Yes, it provides flexibility. One legionary can do the job of many in some situations.’
‘Thus removing redundancy,’ Guilliman asserts.
Thiel nods again.
‘And their composition?’ asks the primarch.
‘Adaptable. Tactical with provision for almost countless potentialities,’ says Thiel. ‘I assigned a specialist to every squad.’
‘So you broke with convention and ignored the tenets of the Principia Bellicosa.’
This statement rings like an accusation to Thiel’s ears. He expects to suffer sanction.
‘I did, my lord. If I have erred then I–’
‘No, Thiel,’ Guilliman cuts him off, ‘you have not. I want to give this endeavour my support. Take the men you need for the Red-Marked, cleanse our lawless borders and know that you shall receive the authority you require.’
Authority.
Thiel glances at the other figure in the room, the one he has been ignoring until now, the one who has neither moved nor spoken since he entered the Residency.
‘Is this the reason why we are not alone?’ Thiel gestures to the silent warrior. A stronger, more experienced – no, less reckless – hand at the tiller, no doubt. ‘Please introduce us, lord, and tell me which worthier legionary is to be my superior.’
Guilliman laughs. ‘You misinterpret my intent, Aeonid.’
A directed lumen ignites, throwing light onto the legionary that Thiel assumed was his replacement. He recognises the empty armour, because it belongs to him – a suit of battleplate inscribed with Thiel’s own tactical argot.
Guilliman stands. ‘Your gift?’
‘One I thought lost.’
‘Do you know what this is?’ Guilliman makes a sweeping gesture across the many scrolls and papers on his desk. ‘Tactics, doctrine… Stratagem, Aeonid.’
He approaches the armour.
‘These markings…’ Guilliman traces them with his eyes, absorbing and cogitating. He looks up and says something that Thiel never thought he would hear from his primarch’s lips. ‘I recognise the tactics they describe, but I can see a methodology emerging from them I had not considered before. Does the juxtaposition of one stratagem to another have meaning also? I believe there are correlations to my own work.’
Thiel is bewildered by his primarch’s ability to decipher meaning and even interpret fresh purpose from such an idiosyncratic set of instructions. He had not considered for himself how the relative position of each piece of tactical doctrine could affect another. He answers as fully as he can.
‘I used it as the foundation for the Red-Marked. Every practical, everything I learned on Calth.’
‘A smaller, more flexible structure. Expertise spread amongst squads, not divisions and companies.’
Thiel nods, realising that he will need to provide little to no spur to Guilliman’s formidable logic.
‘We were few, and fighting a guerrilla war. It is the same for the Red-Marked. Practically, it made sense.’
‘Efficacy?’
‘Exceeding an acceptable mean.’
‘Optimal, then.’
‘Situationally speaking, yes.’
Guilliman is voracious in his appetite for knowledge. His intellect and military mind has uncovered a partial revelation, one he wishes to embrace, adapt, hone and modify to strategic perfection.
Thiel realises that he is the catalyst for this quantum leap in his father’s unfathomable thought process, and cannot help but feel humbled.
‘I have been wrong about several things…’ Guilliman returns to his desk and gathers up the scrolls and papers. He tears them apart, intending it as a gesture rather than a practical means of destroying them.
Thiel’s horror is obvious.
‘What are you doing? That is your doctrine, your work!’
‘It is flawed, Aeonid, and it took you to show me the error in it.’
‘It is? I mean… I did?’
‘To function as we have, in our unwieldy Legions, is no longer tenable. I thought these tenets inviolate. I believed them to be the most efficient way to deploy and yoke our strength in battle. But in my hidebound blindness, I missed the utility that was in front of my very eyes.’ Guilliman nods at Thiel. ‘You, Aeonid.’
Thiel frowns. ‘I do not follow, my lord.’
‘We are not akin to the armies of old, a warlord and the horde that follows him. We are not one Legion, not any more.’ Guilliman smiles and his eyes alight with belligerent possibility. ‘We are hundreds of thousands of individual legionaries, each in support of the others, adapting, reshaping. Moulded not to a single purpose but to many, to any and all.’
Thiel is taken aback. He has never seen his primarch so animated. Guilliman isn’t finished.
‘Until I saw the armour, and heard of your Red-Marked, I thought us a hammer. We are, we can be, but we do not need to be.’ He makes a fist, making as if to deliver a mighty blow. ‘A hammer takes effort to heft with skill. It requires strength. It is inefficient, profligate.’ He opens his hand again, fingers straight and knifelike. ‘A rapier kills with a single thrust. Surgical. Efficient. Deadly.’ He punctuates each word as if stabbing them. ‘We must become the quick death, the blade stroke to the heart.’
Guilliman approaches Thiel. He places a hand upon his shoulder, looking down at his son, grateful for the revelation he has given him.
‘You are the practical to this theoretical, Aeonid.’
They part as Guilliman turns his back, his thoughts laid open for Thiel to hear.
‘Lorgar outmatched me once. I had no theoretical that
countenanced his treachery and no practical responses ready. That won’t happen again. Practical, theoretical... Fresh thinking must prevail over these outmoded concepts. We must become more tactical.’
Thiel finds that he agrees, and asks the obvious question. ‘How?’
Guilliman turns and faces him once again.
‘The Codex, the sum of all practical knowledge and its application. For if this war has taught me anything, it is the danger of hubris. That is your wisdom, Thiel.’
Thiel bows and sinks to one knee, overwhelmed. His pride overflows.
‘You honour me beyond all possible aspiration.’
‘That is well, for you have earned it. Now rise. Our work begins now, in earnest. I have a Codex to finish. Your insight has inspired me, and the future of the Legions will not wait.’
The Long Night
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
‘Jago.’ the girl’s voice breaks the silence. ‘Are you still alive?’
Sevatar sits with his back to the crackling force barrier, ignoring its incessant caress. Around him, only darkness. Not the darkness of a sunless night, but a blackness so absolute that even his eyes cannot pierce its veil. They keep him in this lightless cage, deactivating the barriers and awakening the illumination globes for fifteen minutes each day cycle. That’s when he’s permitted to eat. They bring him nutrient-rich gruel that tastes of bland chemicals and sticks to his tongue like wet sawdust. He grins at his captors every time, telling them it’s the finest thing he’s ever eaten, and that each meal is better than the last.
There’s comfort here in the darkness of his prison cell. Like silk against his bare skin, the blackness soothes his aching eyes. Unfortunately it does nothing for the pounding throb straining its way through his skull. Since his capture, only her voice has relieved the pain. Just one voice among many – the voices of the slain, dredged from his subconscious.
Sevatar has dreamed of the dead a hundred times and more. In those first heartbeats after waking, he sees their staring eyes in the darkness of his cell, and hears the echo of their cries inside his skull.
None of it is real. He knows that.
In the long watches of the night, boredom is his only true companion. The dead lie in their graves, silent and rotting, righteously punished. When he hears them in his restless sleep, it is nothing but the misfiring throb of his own imprisoned dreams.
‘Jago? Are you still alive?’
But not her. Her voice is the only one that lingers when he wakes. Stronger than any other echo. It has been a long, long time since he spoke with a ghost, and he wonders if she died in this very cell, with her shade now lingering within its walls. Perhaps she was killed nearby, and she comes to him now because her spirit smells his curse. She clings to him, the echoing voice of a strange and curious child, whispering to a murderer in the dark. He doubts she even realises she’s dead.
‘Jago?’
‘I am here,’ he says to the cold air. There is blood running from his nose, hot and thick and slow. He wipes it away with the back of his hand. ‘I am here, Altani.’
‘Is it the pain again?’
It takes effort to speak past the pressure grinding down on his brain meat, but he forces the lie past his lips. ‘It has been worse.’
‘It feels like you’re dying.’
He chuckles at that, but doesn’t deny it. ‘I am still here for now. What do you want?’
‘Just to talk. I’m lonely.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, little one.’ He hesitates, already uncomfortable yet wishing to keep her near for a while longer. Is this the fourth time she has come to him? The fifth? The pressure in his head defies his attempts to focus on even mundane tasks like tracking the passing of time. ‘Yours is the only voice I welcome. Did you know that?’
‘I don’t understand. You hear other voices? Even when you are awake? I thought they came only in your dreams.’
‘Yes, and no.’ He shrugs in the darkness, a futile gesture if ever there was one. As a child, he had always heard voices. The sounds of desire and anger inside other people’s skulls. The murmuring emotions that boiled behind their eyes. The raucous songs of the city’s crows as they fought over food.
Worse than any of them was the whispering of the dead. The burning flashes of someone else’s memories when he glanced into the eyes of a body in the gutter. The pleas of unseen voices, begging for him to avenge them. The strangling red torment he would feel in his throat when he passed beneath one of the Night Haunter’s victims hanging in public, disembowelled and crucified.
Sometimes they would speak with him, in that nameless place between slumber and consciousness.
Telepathy. Necromancy. Psychometry. A thousand cultures had a thousand words for such psychic gifts, but the words themselves didn’t matter. All of the music of sentient thought had been his to hear, until the Legion sealed it away, leaving him in blessed silence.
No longer did he overhear others’ thoughts.
No more did he hear the beckoning offers of the slain.
Yet now the dead begin to whisper once again. The seals around his mind are breaking.
‘Jago? Do you hear the other voices when you’re awake?’
‘I have a gift. One I do not want. One I tried very hard to lose, long ago.’
‘That isn’t what I asked, Jago. I know you have the talent. How else do you think we are speaking like this?’
His skin crawls at her knowing tone. ‘What child has the right to sound so knowledgeable about such things?’
‘I watch,’ she says, as calmly and peaceably as ever. ‘I listen. No wonder you’re in so much pain. Did you truly seek to banish your talent?’
‘I tried. And for a time, I succeeded.’
‘It cannot be banished. To try damages the brain, the heart and the soul.’
‘I was willing to risk it, Altani.’
‘But why?’
‘Those with a sixth sense among my brethren are hollow and bitter beings, always wretched with melancholic blood. They do not lead the Night Lords Legion. They cannot lead it – their misery leaves them too mournful and unreliable. So I buried this gift rather than allow it to grow. My father and his viziers helped me to seal it away. I hoped it would decay in disuse.’
‘I see. And instead, it is killing you.’
‘There are worse deaths than this,’ he says aloud.
You should know, he thinks, refusing to voice the thought. The dead do not like to be reminded they are dead.
‘You sound... different tonight, Jago. Is the pain worse than before?’
‘Yes,’ he admits freely, ‘but your voice eases it. What is it that you wished to speak of?’
‘I have questions. Who is the Prince of Crows?’
Sevatar takes a breath, letting her voice wash against his mind the way the darkness brushes over his flesh. Her words quench the crushing fire raking through his thoughts. None of the dead voices in his dreams do that. None of the others bring relief.
‘Did you pluck that name from my head, little one?’
‘No. You spoke it last time, when the pain was fierce. You moaned it out loud. Who is the Prince of Crows?’
‘I am. It is what my brothers call me.’
‘What is a crow?’
‘You ask the strangest things.’ He closes his eyes and thumbs their sore lids with bloody fingertips. ‘A crow is... Nnh. On what world were you born?’
‘Terra. But I was taken by the First Legion when I was very young.’
‘Ah, one of the Earthborn. I’m honoured. If you are from Terra, I assume you know what a bird is.’
‘Yes. I’ve seen them in books. Is a crow a type of bird?’
‘Black of feather and dark of eye. It feeds on the bodies of the dead, and sings in a raw, croaking caw.’
‘Why are you a prince o
f birds?’
Another chuckle leaves his parched throat. Sevatar leans his head back against the force field, feeling its angry hum vibrating through the back of his skull.
‘It’s a title. A joke between my brothers and I. Crows feed on corpses… and I make a lot of corpses.’
The dead girl is silent for a time. He can feel her in the back of his mind sometimes, even when she says nothing. Her presence is like the sweep of invisible searchlights. He knows when he waits beneath the ghost’s unseen gaze.
‘Are you lying to me, Jago?’
‘No, little one. It is true, but it is not the whole truth.’ Sevatar licks his cracked lips, tasting the blood upon them. ‘It is, however, enough truth for now.’
She falls silent again, though her presence doesn’t recede from his mind. He feels her watching from the room’s unbroken blackness.
‘Altani?’ he asks after several minutes have passed.
‘Where is your home world?’
The breath he draws into his lungs is spiced by the scent of his own sour sweat. What he wouldn’t give to be able to bathe.
‘Gone. Dead. Destroyed years ago.’
‘What was it called?’
‘Nostramo. A lawless and sunless place. It burned not because it was guilty, but because we failed to keep it innocent. Our laws failed the moment we sailed away to the stars, and in desperate embarrassment our father incinerated the evidence of his failure.’
‘Your father killed his whole world?’
‘He wasn’t alone. Every one of our ships fired on our home world. I watched him give the order aboard the Nightfall. We rained death down upon the city of my birth. Have you ever seen a world die, Altani?’
‘No. Never.’
He’s almost breathless now, lost in the heat of memory. ‘It’s beautiful. Truly, honestly, beautiful. I’ve never seen anything that stirred me the same way as the night I watched my home world burn. It is de-creation incarnate. You unmake the very threads of the universe, pulling apart a body of rock and fire and life that the galaxy itself conspired to create. You see the world’s burning blood through the cracks in the breaking tectonic plates.’