Even as I felt myself trying to scream too, but only capable of silent horror, I knew I was dreaming. A tiny part of me understood that this was not real, and that the horror would end before my wife and children hit the stones and the base of the tower.
This was the nature of nightmares. It was the way they kept from driving us mad.
The crunch of impact jolted me awake, and now I could scream.
Chapter 4
I did not sleep for the rest of the night. I sat in front of the window, waiting for day, pursued by my predatory, traitorous mind. The nightmare hung over me, a malevolent undertow pulling my thoughts back again and again to the images of my screaming children and to the sickening crunch of shattering bodies. The dream was as vivid as a memory, as disturbing as truth. When I tried to get away from it, the dark gravity of Clostrum pulled me in.
The night was long. I prayed, but though I spoke the words aloud, I could not focus on them. When at last the light began to grey and I could see the rain streaking the window, I sagged with relief.
I could almost have gone back to sleep, protected by the comfort of daylight. I resisted the temptation. I had duties. I also had pride. I would not be defeated by my weaker self. Night was when I would have time to sleep. I would have to learn again to do so.
I dressed, and when I descended from my tower, I heard the sounds of serfs entering Malveil and beginning the work of the day. I lingered on the second floor, giving the kitchen staff time to prepare my meal. I explored the other rooms in this wing. Some of them were completely empty, the floors bare, the walls clear of decoration. I guessed that what Leonel had done to these had meant a purge was the only way of making them usable again. There were a couple of bedchambers close to the central staircase that were still furnished. I paused for a while in each. They felt painfully vacant.
Karoff found me in the room closest to the stairs. Its bed, chairs and tapestries were all dark, though it felt warm rather than gloomy.
‘Will you be eating, lord-governor?’ Karoff asked.
‘Yes,’ I said absently. Then, with firmness of purpose, ‘This room should be used. Malveil should be used.’
‘My lord?’ Karoff said, puzzled.
‘Good work has been done here,’ I said. ‘Let us do a bit more. I would like you to have this and the next room down made ready to be occupied.’
‘Of course. May I ask what visitors we should expect?’
‘Over time, we should expect many, I hope. But not in these rooms. I would like them to be prepared for my children.’
Karoff regarded me steadily. ‘They are going to take up residence in Malveil?’
‘I am going to invite them to do that, yes.’
‘I see.’ He couldn’t quite prevent the slight frown of worry that creased his brow.
I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know exactly what I’m saying,’ I said. ‘They might not accept right away, or at all. But we shall go forward in the confidence that they will. This is the house of the Strocks, after all. It must be able to house the entire family.’
Such as it was. Neither Katrin nor Zander had children. There were other relations, other branches of the Strocks, scattered around Solus. If my line ended, another would take its place, as I had after Leonel died without issue.
‘I will see that it is done, lord-governor,’ Karoff said.
‘Thank you.’ It was up to me, then, to see that Karoff and the serfs’ efforts would not be in vain.
I had come to Solus with the hope of doing more than restoring its exports to their proper level. I wasn’t sure if I hoped to heal myself. I didn’t know if that was possible. But I had some thoughts of legacy. And I missed my family. I missed what it had been. I wanted to be able to hold on to what was left.
I started down the stairs, Karoff a step behind me. ‘Did you sleep well, my lord?’ he asked.
He spoke with such genuine concern that I answered honestly. ‘It was a broken night.’
‘I expect there will be some adjustment necessary.’ He sounded like he needed reassurance. ‘You will not have had the luxury of such space in a long time.’
‘Quite so. Quite so.’
I wanted him to be right, too.
I had Belzhek leave me at the schola progenium. The stern complex was about a mile west of the Square of the Emperor’s Bounty. The Oblivis flowed around three of its sides, like a moat isolating the schola from a city that was failing to live up to the principles instilled inside the institute’s walls. Round towers stood at each of the building’s four corners. It was square, hulking, a brutally solid fortress of discipline. Its rockcrete walls were not dark with stain. They were black to start with. There was nothing welcoming about the schola progenium, and that was as it should be. It took in the orphans of officers and nobles, children who had lost those on whom they depended for protection, and it changed them from the vulnerable into the strong. It turned them into shock troops and commissars and officers. It made them into the unbreakable spine of the Astra Militarum.
A tall, circular counter of black marble greeted me like a turret in the entrance hall. The trooper seated at it was, like Belzhek, a veteran who had left most of his body behind on the battlefield. Multi-jointed tool arms extended from his shoulders, and one of his eyes was bionic, scanning me with a dull red glow. He grinned when he recognised me, and would have risen if he had still had legs.
‘Colonel!’ he exclaimed, then corrected himself. ‘Lord-governor, I mean. I crave your pardon, I–’
‘That’s quite all right, trooper. I’m not used to the change in rank myself yet.’
He bowed his head in thanks. ‘It is an honour, my lord. I served under you on Epsilon Frouros.’
‘Then we shared in a great victory.’
‘We did, my lord, we did.’
‘I have come to see Instructor Katrin Strock.’
The trooper looked startled, as if he had only now understood the connection of the name. ‘Of course, my lord.’ He consulted a data-slate. ‘Her current indoctrination lecture will be ending shortly. Shall I send for her?’
‘No, thank you. I’ll go to her.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ He turned to the servo-skull hovering over the desk. ‘History, Strock,’ he said. The skull chattered, and a ribbon of punched runic code emerged from its jaw. The trooper tore it off. Next to the counter was a servitor in a slumped, passive state. The trooper fed the code ribbon into a receptor at the back of the servitor’s head, and it jerked to life. It turned away from the counter, running on motorised treads, and I followed.
The servitor led me through the schola progenium’s maze of corridors. We passed numerous lecture amphitheatres, doorways to drill courtyards, and dormitoria. At length, it stopped by the entrance to a fourth-floor amphitheatre. During our journey there, I grew more and more uncertain. This was going to be a more difficult meeting than the one with Zander. He and I had simply become strangers to one another. Katrin had broken her connections with me. I revised and discarded the things I might say to her a dozen times over. Each one was inadequate. We had been too long apart, and the gulf was too wide.
I looked through the doorway. I was at the bottom of the amphitheatre, looking up at the curving rows of pews where students sat at rigid attention. Before them, Katrin paced as she lectured.
‘What then does the Age of Redemption teach us?’ she said. ‘It teaches us that the will of the Emperor will ultimately triumph over every form of apostasy. It teaches us that redemption is possible. But it also shows us the path to redemption. There can only be redemption through fire, through blood, and through the purging of the heretic and the traitor. It teaches us that mercy is worse than a weakness. It is a crime against the Emperor. If mercy had been extended to a single heretic, that would have been an invitation to another Reign of Blood. Those who extend mercy reveal the uncertainty of their faith. On th
e battlefield, uncertainty means death. It means defeat. It means dishonour. If, after what we have learned today, there is one among you who believes in the quality of mercy, then know that you will receive none from me.’
Her hair was the same light brown as her mother’s, and she wore it shaved close to her skull. The gaze she turned on her students was forbidding. In her black uniform, her boots thudding against the floor with the steady rhythm of an execution’s drumbeat, she was the embodiment of pitilessness. Her posture was unnaturally straight, held that way by the iron brace on her spine. Its collar went around her throat, adding still more to her air of absolute authority.
I could see the pride she took in the work she was doing. I also knew this was not the destiny she had initially chosen for herself. Despite our estrangement, she was the one who had once been going to follow my steps into the Solus Nightmarch.
When Leonel died and the inheritance of the governorship came to my branch of the House of Strock, my children became automatically exempt from the military tithe, as part of the mechanism designed to ensure a continuity of rule on the planet. The exemption, however, did not mean they could not volunteer. There had never been any chance that Zander would seek to serve. Katrin, on the other hand, enlisted as soon as she came of age. And then, during training, she broke her back. The injury was too severe for her to continue. The bionics necessary to make her viable in combat would be wasted on someone with no battlefield experience.
Katrin could not serve on the front lines. So she had turned her energies into forging the officers who would. As I watched her, I was able to put aside some of my pain and indulge in pride.
The lecture ended, and the students filed out through the upper exits. Katrin moved to a lectern and gathered her notes. ‘Hello, father,’ she said without looking up.
I stepped into the amphitheatre. I hadn’t realised she had seen me. ‘Hello, Katrin.’
She walked towards me, stopping at a formal distance. ‘I heard about the battle for Clostrum,’ she said. ‘I am glad you survived.’ The words were a pat greeting. They did not sound genuine, and I could see the judgement in her eyes.
It was that judgement that I had been dreading, because it mirrored my own self-condemnation. She had resented me since Eliana’s death, and I wondered if the reasons for her anger had changed since then. Did she resent me for having left? Or for having returned? Perhaps she wasn’t sure herself.
‘Tell me,’ she went on, ‘are you grateful for having lived when so many of your troops died?’ There was nothing pat about that question. The niceties were over, and I had just heard what she thought about mercy.
‘I am grateful that I can still serve,’ I said. ‘Beyond that, I’m not sure.’ I offered her complete honesty, if she was willing to accept it.
She gave me a curt nod. ‘We must serve the Emperor however we can, even if it is not in the manner of our first choosing.’
She started walking again, and we left the theatre.
‘Have you seen Zander?’ she asked.
‘I have.’
‘How is he?’
‘You don’t know?’
She shook her head. ‘We do not speak much.’
‘Why is that?’
She looked at me as if I were mocking her. I was not. I no longer wanted things unsaid. Our family had lost too much already, and much of what we had lost was time.
‘If you have fallen out,’ I said, ‘I would like to know why. Precisely.’
‘All right. I don’t speak to him because I don’t know what has happened to his sense of honour. Or shame, for that matter.’
‘He seems to have misplaced them both,’ I agreed. ‘I intend to help him find his honour again, at least.’
‘I don’t think he will be interested in your help.’
‘He won’t have a choice. I will not permit the council to continue as it has been. That is the mission I have been given on Solus. That is how I am to serve the Emperor.’
‘I thought you were to serve as lord-governor.’ She was openly contemptuous. I saw myself through her eyes. I was a disgraced commander, scuttling away from the battlefield to slip into the privileges afforded him by the lucky chance of his birth. I could not blame her. I kept seeing the same thing in the mirror.
‘The governorship is a means to the end,’ I said. ‘The council is corrupt. I have been commanded to be the cleansing fire. I am going to make Solus worthy of what you are teaching here.’
‘I hope you will,’ she said. She sounded less hostile. I felt that she wanted to believe me.
We parted outside her study. ‘I would like to see you again,’ I said. ‘I would like us not to be strangers.’
She hesitated, then nodded her acquiescence. I thanked her and turned to go. I had taken a few steps when she said, ‘Do you miss her?’
I turned back. Do I miss her? I tried to find the words to answer, but everything I could think of to say was hopelessly trite and inadequate to the scale of Eliana’s absence in my life.
My silence was the answer Katrin sought. She nodded again, but more gently. We shared a moment of loss, the distance between us diminished. I thought I saw behind her wall of discipline, and at the same time, I felt I understood Zander better too. In very different ways, they had both retreated, whether they knew it or not. He into indolence, she behind the walls of the schola progenium, they were where they believed they would not be hurt again.
Who was I to try to lure them out from behind their shields? Was I doing any better?
Maybe. Maybe. I think I am trying, and I think that is necessary.
I left, not saying anything about Malveil. There would be time, a better time, to extend the invitation. But I left the schola with more hope than when I had entered. I believed we could be a family, and make the House of Strock as strong as it could be, as strong as Solus needed it to be.
I smiled to the trooper at the entrance when I passed him again. The smile came easily. I could not remember the last time that had been true.
‘Rosala? They said they had discovered corruption in Rosala?’ Ernst Stavaak, enforcer of the Adeptus Arbites, began to laugh. Soon he was roaring, pounding a hammer-like fist against the scarred surface of his desk.
We were in his office, high in the thin tower that rose from the centre of the barracks of the Arbites in the south-west sector of Valgaast. The windows were grimy, the view of the city smeared. I could just make out the silhouettes of the cathedral and the Council Hall. I had come here to prepare my opening salvo against Montfor and her allies.
It was almost a minute before Stavaak got himself under control. ‘I’m sorry, lord-governor,’ he said, wiping tears from his broad face. His features were even more scarred than his desk.
I waved his apologies away and leaned back in the chair facing him. ‘If the joke is a good one, I want to share in it. Or have I been made its butt?’
‘I’m afraid you have been. But I wouldn’t worry. I don’t think too many people outside this building and Rosala itself would appreciate the humour.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Discovering a black market in Rosala would be like announcing that winter is damp.’
‘And this is common knowledge?’
‘Not exactly. In Rosala, it’s an open secret. Beyond its borders…’ He shrugged. ‘In general, I would say that if you know, then you’re involved.’
That was reassuring, in its way. It meant that I didn’t have to wonder why Veiss had not mentioned this. I was going to have to live with suspicion as my constant companion for the foreseeable future. I did not want it to develop into total paranoia.
‘Can I ask why nothing has been done about Rosala, if its level of corruption is so high?’
‘The enforcement of local laws is not the responsibility of the Adeptus Arbites,’ Stavaak reminded me.
‘
Not even when it affects the planet’s ability to meet its obligations to the Imperium?’
‘It is a question of balance and resources. Rosala is a large agri sector.’
It was. It took up half the land mass of a small continent in the southern hemisphere.
‘Are you saying the problem is too big to deal with and should be ignored?’
‘Not at all. Or perhaps, not any longer. But Councillor Montfor and her allies have been careful. Other than the matter of Solus’ export level, which is not information that it was possible for us to gather at this end, they have done nothing to interfere with this world’s loyal service to the Imperium. And they have been the ones setting the laws of this world. There has been no way to intervene without destabilising the government.’
‘But the situation is different now.’
Stavaak grinned. ‘You are lord-governor. Your word is the authority now.’
I grinned back. ‘I believe we will be able to work together productively for the good of Solus.’
‘I hope so. You understand that what you are undertaking will cause upheavals?’
‘I have been sent to disrupt the corrupt order here. That is the command of the Adeptus Terra.’
‘Good.’
‘So based on what you know, is Councillor Trefecht involved in the black market exportations from Rosala?’
‘Involved? She controls it.’
‘Even better.’
‘What do you intend to do?’ Stavaak asked.
‘Make an example of her.’
I returned to Malveil that evening with a sense of having made real progress towards my goals, both official and personal. I retired to my chamber for a short while and wrote at the desk, filling in time before my evening meal with work, trying to keep myself distracted.
It didn’t work. My eyes kept going to the south window. I kept thinking about the roof of the tower. At length, I gave up. I left the chamber and climbed the ladder to the trapdoor. I paused before opening it.
What do you expect to learn?
The House of Night and Chain Page 5